


Cannot Help But Fall

by achray



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Implied Violence, M/M, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-27
Updated: 2012-05-25
Packaged: 2017-11-04 10:25:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achray/pseuds/achray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John really hadn’t expected to come down for his morning tea on a normal Baker St Sunday and find a strange man asleep on the sofa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to everyone who left comments and kudos on my previous story: very encouraging!
> 
> It seems I still want to torment John with jealousy. Luckily I don't think I'm alone in that. This is chapter 1 of 2, and is pre-slash for Sherlock/John, the second half will be slash.
> 
> Now translated into Chinese by rosyrain! http://archiveofourown.org/works/962123/chapters/1885731

In John’s long history of flat-sharing, he had frequently woken up to find strangers crashed out on the sofa, the floor, or, after one particularly memorable party, in the bath. But he really hadn’t expected to come down for his morning tea on a normal Baker St Sunday and find a strange man asleep on the sofa. He’d left Sherlock in the living-room at midnight, simultaneously pouring manic invective on his third episode of CSI and updating his blog with some arcane facts about something John hadn’t followed. It was possible that a client had shown up, of course, but implausible that Sherlock would have asked them to make themselves at home on the sofa. Or perhaps Sherlock had gone out after all and the mystery sleeper was…a member of his homeless network? That Sherlock had taken pity on and invited back for a kip in their flat?

This train of thought was clearly going nowhere. John went into the kitchen and started making tea, not being particularly quiet about it. The body on the sofa stirred, groaned, and slowly sat up, revealing itself as a youngish man, probably a few years younger than Sherlock. Not a homeless person – John might not be Sherlock, but he could deduce posh at a glance, and this man’s obviously styled floppy brown hair and linen shirt, even slept in, had probably cost more than John’s weekly pension.

‘Cup of tea?’ said John.

‘That would be fabulous, thank you’, said the man, public-school tones confirming all John’s suspicions. He met John’s eyes and smiled, flirtatious, then deliberately looked him up and down appraisingly. John was conscious that he was only wearing a tatty dressing-gown and nothing underneath. But he was damned if he would feel self-conscious in his own flat. He fetched down another mug and teabag: no way he was getting the proper teapot out for whoever this was.

‘Milk and sugar?’, he asked.

‘Milk and one sugar would be divine.’

John handed over the tea, and the stranger deliberately slid his fingers over the back of his hand as he did so. John suppressed an eye-roll. Honestly, if he thought he was going to throw John off-balance with a little camp flirting, he had picked the wrong man: years of being often the only straight(ish) man at Harry’s legendary parties had rendered him pretty much immune.

‘So’, said John. ‘Are you…?’ He paused. He had been going to say ‘a friend of Sherlock’s’, but it suddenly seemed too suggestive.

‘Toby’, said the man, holding out a hand for a handshake. ‘Sherlock and I were at school together, eons ago’.

‘Really’, said John. This was – not very enlightening as to why Toby was in their flat, though interesting information. He let go of Toby’s hand and settled in his chair.

‘You must be the flatmate’, said Toby, curling his legs up under him on the sofa, and blowing on his tea. ‘John, isn’t it? I’ve heard about you.’

‘Really’, said John again, slightly more dangerously. ‘From Sherlock.’

‘I don’t know how you manage to put up with him’, said Toby. He took a sip of tea, and looked up at John from under his eyelashes. ‘Though I can see why he likes having you around.’

John frowned. He thought about taking his tea and going upstairs to drink it in peace, but he was also consumed by curiosity. He was formulating ways to ask Toby why he had been asleep on the sofa, when Sherlock’s door opened with a crash and Sherlock strode into the room, dressing-gown billowing dramatically.

‘John’, he said. ‘I need caffeine. Immediately.’

‘Morning, darling’, said Toby.

Sherlock whirled round on him. ‘What are you still doing here?’, he demanded, accusing. ‘I told you to take a cab home.’

‘At 3am on a Saturday, in central London, when it was pissing it down outside?’, said Toby, indignantly. ‘I’d have had to walk for miles. These shoes are handmade Italian leather, I’m not subjecting them to London rain. Besides’ – he lowered his voice and gave Sherlock the same look he’d just been giving John – ‘I think I left my watch in your bedroom.’

‘Bedside table’, said Sherlock, dismissively. There was no trace of embarrassment in his voice. ‘Since it now appears to have stopped raining, I suggest you get it and then go. John and I have important work to do today.’

John tried to look as if this wasn’t news to him.

‘ _John_ made me a cup of tea’, Toby said petulantly, cradling it. ‘I like him.’

‘John suffers from the malady of English manners’, said Sherlock. ‘As you know, I don’t. Leave now.’

Toby sighed, long-suffering, set down the tea and stood up and stretched, obviously posing, revealing a substantial strip of pale skin between shirt and close-fitting trousers. John noted that he was undoubtedly very fit, if you liked that kind of thing. He looked at himself in the overmantel mirror, inspecting his perfect profile from several angles, ran his hands through his hair and grimaced.

‘Do try to remember that I usually work on Saturday nights, Sherlock’, he said. ‘I’m the one doing you a favour, here.’

Sherlock stalked into his bedroom and emerged a moment later with a silver Rolex, ostentatiously holding it at arms length. He tossed it to Toby, who caught it gracefully and fastened it on. ‘My jacket?’, he said.

‘Floor behind the desk’, said Sherlock, in his most bored tone.

Toby went to look. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you’, he said to John, looking doubtfully at the mass of crumpled fabric in his arms. ‘I’m sure we’ll see each other very soon.’

‘Try not to slam the front door on your way out’, said Sherlock, flopping onto the vacated sofa and waving a hand towards the stairs. ‘Our landlady may still be sleeping.’

‘Always delightful to see you too, sweetheart’, said Toby.  ‘Till next time’. He blew a kiss in Sherlock’s direction, causing an offended huff, and left.

***

‘What’, said John, ‘the bloody hell was that all about.’

Sherlock, still lying on the sofa, placed an arm over his face.

‘I know you can hear me’, said John. ‘I’m waiting for you to explain why I came down in my dressing-gown and found a completely random man asleep in _our_ flat.’

‘I had told him to leave’, said Sherlock, muffled.

‘Did you actually shag him and then try to throw him out at 3am? Seriously?’

Sherlock muttered something indecipherable.

John was working himself up into a good rant. ‘Is this something you do, then, have sex with men and then, what, tell them to get out so that I _don’t_ find them when I wake up?’

‘Not men, plural’, Sherlock said from under his arm. ‘Just Toby’.

‘What, so he’s your’ – John found that he was unable to say the word ‘fuckbuddy’ to Sherlock, though it was the only term that sprang to mind – ‘your boyfriend?’

Sherlock scoffed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, he said.

‘Ridiculous, right’, said John. ‘I’m not the one languishing on the bloody sofa like a drama queen. Forgive me for assuming that someone you’re clearly shagging on a regular basis might have any kind of relationship with you.’

‘Is it actually necessary for us to talk about this?’, said Sherlock, trying for plaintive. ‘I haven’t even had any tea yet.’

‘Yes, it is’, said John, folding his arms. ‘And you’re perfectly capable of making yourself tea if you want some. You could even try holding a conversation at the same time.’

Sherlock sat up, groaning at this unreasonableness. He took one of the sofa cushions and clutched it in front of him, fiddling with the edges. ‘It’s not what you think’, he said.

‘How would you know what I think?’, said John.

Sherlock sighed, hunching slightly over the cushion. ‘Toby’s a professional’, he said, not meeting John’s eyes.

‘A professional what?’ said John, before his mind caught up with the implications.

Obviously outraged by John’s slowness, Sherlock sat up a bit more and looked at him. ‘A _professional_ ’, he said, enunciating each syllable. ‘Sex worker, prostitute, male escort, hooker, rent boy, whatever your preferred term’. He waved a hand dismissively.

‘You’re telling me that you _paid him for sex_?’, said John.

‘That would be the purport of ‘professional’, yes’, said Sherlock. ‘Though as it happens I was able to help him out with a tricky situation involving a client a couple of years back – how we met again, in fact - so he gives me a special rate.’ He frowned. ‘I doubt I could afford it, otherwise – do you know he charges nearly three times as much per hour as I do?’

John felt the need to break into this thought process before Sherlock concluded that he should supplement his consulting detective income with some light prostitution.

‘I don’t care how much he charges’, he said with emphasis. ‘This is _wrong_ , Sherlock. Why would you even –’ He stopped. Why would you even contemplate paying for sex, when surely half the gay men in London would happily provide it for free, was more or less what he was thinking, but there was no advantage in feeding Sherlock’s ego.

‘It’s not as though I picked him up on the street’, said Sherlock. ‘We were at school together: I’ve known him since he was thirteen. And he’s very exclusive in his clientele,’ he added, as though this would reassure John.

‘Christ’, said John. ‘If you were having sex with him at thirteen, please don’t tell me, because I really don’t need to know that.’

‘ _I_ wasn’t’, said Sherlock.

John rubbed his hands over his face. This was clearly one of those areas where Sherlock’s moral compass deviated wildly from that of normal people. John blamed boarding school.

‘Having sex with prostitutes is never a good idea’, he said. ‘Believe me, I’ve spent enough years treating STDs. It’s’ – he rejected ‘dangerous’ as too encouraging – ‘it’s _stupid_. And also illegal.’ Not that this was likely to deter Sherlock, of course. ‘If you want to have sex, why can’t you just go out and pull someone, like normal people do?’

‘Yes, because that’s obviously been working out so well for you’, said Sherlock, with unnecessary meanness, John felt. He stood up and started pacing around the room, working up to high melodrama mode. ‘I don’t want to go out and ‘pull’ someone, as you put it so charmingly. I have no interest whatsoever in conversation and flirtation and all those tedious rituals that ‘normal people’ seem to find necessary as a prelude. I don’t _want_ to want to have sex, I find it - distracting. But I tried being celibate, and it didn’t _work_. I’m not a monk’. He sounded wistful. ‘Prior experiences suggest that long-term celibacy would only be successful for me if I stuck to a rigid daily routine, but I can’t do that and do my work as well.’

 ‘So when you met Toby, it seemed like a good solution’, said John, wearily. ‘You’ve been doing this a while, then.’ He sensed that he was never going to win this argument. Sherlock used his work like a trump card, allowing him to discard ordinary morality with utter abandon.

'I'm not going to stop seeing him', said Sherlock, defiantly.

John wondered what it would be like to live with a sexually-frustrated Sherlock, and shuddered slightly. ‘Yes, I’m getting that’, he said. ‘I’m not happy about it, but it’s not my business to stop you. Not that I could even if I wanted to.’

‘You could tell Mycroft’, Sherlock pointed out. ‘He’d probably have Toby shipped to Saudi Arabia as a houseboy within twenty-four hours.’

‘Yes, but you know I wouldn’t do that’, said John. ‘However, now that I do know what’s going on, I want to have some ground rules. Such as, warn me in advance if I’m likely to find _professionals_ hanging out in our living room in the mornings.’

‘Fine, fine, whatever’.

‘And’, said John, warming up, ‘I’m not going to interfere with whatever you and Toby have going on, but I’m warning you now that I won’t live with someone who can’t be respectful to their sexual partners. I don’t care if he’s a prostitute, if you’re shagging someone, you don’t treat them like shit.’

‘You’re actually threatening to move out, if, what, I’m not _polite_ to him’, said Sherlock, incredulously. ‘Toby’s known me for years, it’s not as though he’s offended. ’

‘You heard me’, said John. ‘This isn’t negotiable. I know you think it’s OK to be rude to my girlfriends, me and pretty much everyone else we know, but it’s different if you’re shagging them.’

Sherlock looked deeply mutinous, but didn’t say anything, so John counted it a victory and headed off for a shower.

***

The next week was – awkward. Neither of them brought up the subject, but John spent a lot of time constructing imaginary arguments with Sherlock in which he conclusively demonstrated that paying for sex was wrong, wrong and wrong again. Sherlock projected an air of complete unconcern, but John caught him watching him when he thought John wasn’t looking. He suspected that his threat of leaving had hit home. On the Friday night, John accepted an invitation of Mike Stamford’s to a dinner party, mostly to get out of the house, and when seated next to the inevitable single woman, he put in a bit more effort than usual to be charming. Let Sherlock see that he didn’t have a problem finding women who wanted to have sex with him. Except that halfway through the evening, when a lot of wine had been drunk, Emma confided that she was sleeping with a married man at her office, and ended the night weeping on John’s shoulder while he escorted her home in a cab. Sometimes it was difficult not to feel that Sherlock had a point about relationships.

Luckily, on the Sunday, a potential client rang Sherlock about a scam in the construction industry: blackmail and corruption leading to attempted murder, and there were a brilliant three days in which Sherlock and John disguised themselves as construction workers, dodged several large men throwing bricks at them, Sherlock lowered John over a roof so that he could kick in a window, and they eventually locked the main offender in a portaloo and left the police to find him. After that, things were mostly back to what counted as normal, for them.

It was long enough before Sherlock mentioned Toby again – more than a month –that John had started to wonder whether he had decided to find an alternative solution, or give celibacy another shot. But on one otherwise unremarkable weekday evening, when they were both idly fiddling about on their laptops, Sherlock cleared his throat and said, still typing, ‘Toby’s coming round this Friday night.’

‘Right’, said John. ‘Yes, OK.’

‘You said to warn you’, said Sherlock. ‘Though I don’t see why, as he’s likely to arrive after you’re in bed and leave before you’re up.’

‘Well’, said John. ‘Thanks for the heads-up anyway.’

He wondered about making plans for Friday night, but that seemed too much like being driven out of the flat. So instead he spent an ordinary evening watching bad telly while Sherlock prodded at unidentifiable substances in the kitchen. At around midnight, he stood up and headed for bed, glancing at Sherlock on the way past. He looked totally engrossed in his experiment. What he didn’t look like, by any stretch of the imagination, was someone waiting excitedly for a lover, or even waiting excitedly to have sex.

 John went through his usual bedtime routine and lay down, but there was no chance he would be able to sleep. He couldn’t stop himself listening for another person entering the flat. How did Toby and Sherlock manage their – transaction? Presumably, if he was the one being paid, Toby did whatever Sherlock wanted. But what was that? Something he couldn’t do himself, John assumed, if masturbation wasn’t enough. He couldn’t help thinking about what those things might be, what Sherlock might like, what he might want enough that he was prepared to put up with another person – and John had no doubt whatsoever that ‘putting up with’ was the right phrase – in order to get it. John’s imagination ran rapidly through blowjobs and anal sex into things he hadn’t ever done or wanted to do. In his many years as a student he had lived with a wide variety of flatmates, men and women, straight and bi and gay, and he’d certainly known about their sex lives, heard them having sex, and, on rather too many occasions, ended up having sex with one of them himself. But that had all been… ordinary. Relatively speaking.

It wasn’t that difficult to imagine Sherlock having sex, but it was difficult to imagine him being nice about it. In fact, John thought, it was easier to imagine Sherlock with a professional, so-called, than it was to picture him with a boyfriend, someone he genuinely liked. He could see Sherlock being demanding in bed, perfectionist about what he wanted from someone, completely unprepared to accept incompetence. He could even imagine that Sherlock, who intensely disliked being mediocre at anything, would want to be good at sex, would be interested in what it might take to reduce a partner to pure need and desire. He probably had a special file somewhere on it. But what it was impossible to picture was _Sherlock_ in that state, Sherlock begging someone to touch, to suck, to move, to thrust, to do anything that would help him to come. 

These thoughts were both depressing, because John felt that he was close to agreeing with Sherlock that hiring a rentboy was the best solution for his own unique Sherlock-ness, and arousing. John lay awake for a long time, trying to think of other things, and not hearing anything, before he finally slept.

The next morning, the flat seemingly quiet when he woke, he was still careful to shower and dress before venturing downstairs. Just as well: Sherlock was on one side of the desk, ostensibly reading the paper, and Toby was lounging in the chair on the other, texting and drinking tea – out of John’s mug, he noted with annoyance. Toby was dressed, more or less, in an extremely tight-fitting neon pink T-shirt and jeans. Sherlock was still in pyjamas and dressing-gown. He looked exactly the same as always, untouched and untouchable. No marks, no indication that he had done anything out of the ordinary the previous night. Both of them looked up at John as he walked in.

‘Morning’, said Toby, smirking.

Sherlock gave John a pointed look from over the paper, easy to interpret: you are responsible for this.

‘I believe I should be thanking you for Sherlock’s unusual graciousness’, Toby said. ‘I understand you threatened him with all sorts if he wasn’t better behaved to me.’

‘Not you specifically’, said John, repressively.  He headed for the kettle.

‘I should tell our old housemaster about you’, Toby said. ‘He could never get Sherlock to do anything he didn’t want to: used to drive him insane. He’d love to know your secret’. His tone was almost a leer. ‘It must be that military discipline of yours. I do love a man in uniform. I see a lot of soldiers in my line of work – only the top brass, of course. I expect I know your former Colonel.’

Sherlock aggressively snapped his paper straight, clearly signalling agonized boredom.

John didn’t bother replying to any of this. He went about making tea, taking Sherlock’s favoured mug in retaliation and not offering any to either him or Toby. 

Toby’s phone chimed several times, and he glanced at it briefly. ‘Well’, he said, rising and pocketing it. ‘Must be off.’ His tone turned sly. ‘So kind of you to let me stay, Sherlock.’

‘You have a luxury flat off Sloane Square’, said Sherlock, evidently driven to the limits of his tolerance. ‘Why you would want to sleep here is beyond me.’

‘Maybe I just love to wind you up, darling’, said Toby, shrugging on a jacket and picking up a large and expensive-looking leather bag from under the desk. ‘Besides, your bed is more comfortable than mine. Though given the amount I spent on my mattress that definitely shouldn’t be possible.’ He inspected himself briefly in the mirror, carefully disarranging a few strands of hair. ‘John, always a pleasure. Sherlock, till next time.’

John went and sat in the empty seat as his footsteps receded on the stairs. He picked up one of the sections of the newspaper and silently began counting off the seconds: he reckoned Sherlock wouldn’t make it to ten. Sure enough, nine seconds in, Sherlock lowered the paper to the desk and glared at John.

‘He was alone _in my room_ for nearly six hours, he said, accusing. ‘He probably got up and went through all my drawers the moment I left.’

‘Where were you, then?’, John said, puzzled.

‘Working, of course. I had an experiment to finish. I thought it would be _rude_ if I checked on him every half hour while he was allegedly sleeping.’

John wondered if Sherlock wouldn’t, or couldn’t, share a bed with someone.

‘Yes, that would’ve been’, he agreed, turning back to the paper; Sherlock sighed loudly and did the same. John read the first few lines of an article without taking any of it in. Six hours – it was only nine now – that left three hours at most for Sherlock and Toby to have been having sex, and John must surely have been awake until nearly 2am. Was Toby usually here and gone within an hour or two? How much time was Sherlock paying him for? John wasn’t sure if these thoughts made him feel worse, suggesting a pretty quick and clinical encounter, or better in that at least Sherlock wasn’t having hours and hours of sex and then cuddling with Toby, treating him like a boyfriend. He didn’t care about Toby’s innuendoes and annoying flirtatiousness, but he could admit that seeing him looking relaxed in Baker St, drinking tea out of John’s mug, was…upsetting. Did you make him tea?, he wanted to ask. Did you let him use my mug on purpose, or just not notice? But he couldn’t: he had asked Sherlock to be nicer, and it wasn’t right to be irritated that Sherlock was showing a small bit of consideration to someone. Someone other than John, that was.

***

In the next few months John saw Toby three more times, though Sherlock had seen him five, not that John was counting. The first time, John went to use the loo in the early hours of the morning and found the bathroom occupied. As he dithered for a moment about whether to bang on the door – Sherlock kept a stack of books on the bathroom floor and had been known to start reading in the bath or on the loo and lose all track of time – or just go back to bed, it opened and Toby came out, obviously just showered, wearing only a towel round his waist. ‘Sorry’, he said, insincerely. ‘All yours.’ In the light spilling from the bathroom door, John could see some marks on his chest and collarbones, reddened, bruises perhaps. He blinked. As Toby brushed past, John smelt Sherlock’s soap. Sherlock’s bedroom door opened and closed. John went into the steamy bathroom. He didn’t want to think about those marks, whether they had been made by someone’s hands, clutching, or by their mouth. But he still stood gripping the sink for a couple of moments, breathing hard.  

The second time, John was in the living-room first, on an unusually bright spring morning. Sherlock had told him Toby might be there, and he would have known anyhow from a leather jacket thrown across the arm of the sofa. Neither Sherlock or Toby were in evidence, though someone was in the shower. John took his tea over to sit in the sunnier chair by the fireplace and tripped over Toby’s bag on the way, spilling his tea and some of its contents out, wallet, keys. He knelt down to put them back in and set the bag back upright; impossible not to feel that it was heavy and see that it contained things other than the everyday – some recognizable – handcuffs, dildos, vibrator – some that John couldn’t have told the use for, though his mind instantly came up with a number of disturbing possibilities. There was a cough from the kitchen and he stood up too quickly to see Toby posing against the door-frame, fully dressed and lifting an eyebrow.

‘Those aren’t _all_ for Sherlock, you know’, he said.

‘I wasn’t –’ said John. ‘I tripped on your bag. Sorry.’ He could feel himself blushing.

‘Oh, by all means look your fill’, said Toby. ‘I’d be happy to give you a practical demonstration as well if you want. Any time. Special discounts for retired members of her Majesty’s armed forces.’

‘Thanks, but I’m really not gay’, said John, sitting down and willing the blush to subside. He could see that Toby was reveling in his embarrassment.

‘Yes, Sherlock did mention that’, Toby said, unrepentantly. ‘Tragic waste.’ He looked John over again. ‘You know, Sherlock’s really into you. I was rather expecting my business here was done once you moved in, but if you’re still holding out for the wife and two kids, well…all good for me.’ Without shifting his position in the door-frame he leaned forwards slightly, lowering his voice, confidential: ‘I can’t wait for the role-play, Dr Watson. Maybe we could borrow your dress uniform while you’re out. Or your surgical kit, that might work.’

John was momentarily gripped by rage so intense that it frightened him: he had to forcibly restrain himself from jumping up and punching Toby in his smirking mouth. He couldn’t speak, even if he could have thought of the perfect Sherlockian withering response.

Luckily or unluckily Sherlock chose that moment to appear, brushing past Toby in his tartan dressing-gown, hair damp. ‘Why are you _still here_?’, he said, exasperated.

‘I was just telling John that I could do a special offer on a threesome if he were interested’, said Toby.

‘Don’t be ludicrous’, said Sherlock, but absently, already at the desk turning on his laptop.

Toby did his eyebrow raise again at John, who glared back. He supposed that wasn’t the worst thing Toby could have said about their exchange, in a list of worst things that included: ‘John was just looking at my sex toys and speculating about which ones you and I might use’. Toby smiled, meaningful, as though he knew exactly what John was thinking, picked up his bag, and sauntered out.

The third time John saw Toby, he had deliberately gone out to the pub and had a few pints, staying till closing time, hoping it would take his mind off – things – and help him sleep. He had already planned a lie-in for the morning; no more embarrassing pre-breakfast encounters. But when he let himself quietly in to the flat, he heard a soft noise from the living-room, and Sherlock’s voice said, ‘Yes, like that.’ John glanced in. The lights were off, but he could see in the glow of the streetlights that Sherlock was leaning with his hands braced on one of the bookshelves by the fireplace, back to John; it took John an instant to comprehend, but then he realized with a shock that Toby was kneeling between Sherlock and the shelves, one hand gripping his waist. Sherlock was shirtless, and his trousers were hanging loose, as John watched, frozen, he shifted his hips forward slightly. ‘That again, harder’, he said. It was the same tone in which he might ask John to pass the butter, he wasn’t even lowering his voice. John tore his gaze away, with effort, and walked as quietly as he could up the stairs. He didn’t think they had noticed he was there.

But when he got to his room he sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. He was half-hard, and more than a little drunk, which made it more difficult than usual to stop himself from thinking maudlin thoughts. He couldn’t deal with this any more. He couldn’t deal with Toby, with the idea of him, and he couldn’t deal with Sherlock having sex with another man - in the living-room, for god’s sake. And he didn’t want to think about why, why he had spent so much time in the last few months obsessing over the sex that Sherlock might or might not be having, imagining it. He especially didn’t want to wonder about whether Toby’s insinuation that Sherlock fancied John was based on something that Sherlock had really said or done, or pure invention. What he wanted, John thought, with drunken self-pity, was for everything to go back to the way it had been before he had found out about Toby. Just Sherlock and himself, not Sherlock, John, and Sherlock’s occasional rent-boy slash old school-friend slash casual shag. Because sex always confused things, and no matter how much John tried to ignore or deny the facts, it was clear that whether or not he himself wanted to have sex with Sherlock – and although his body was definitely interested, the rest of him was far from sure – he certainly didn’t want Sherlock to have sex with anyone else. (Unless it was really terrible and boring sex, but with Toby’s bag of tricks and what John had just seen, that seemed depressingly unlikely).

John was aware that the mature, adult way to deal with his feelings would be to sit down and talk to Sherlock about them, and that at the very least he ought to point out that Sherlock should keep his sexual encounters behind a closed door. Instead, the next morning, he made no mention of the fact that Toby had been there, and spent most of the day online updating his profile on various dating websites and contacting women who looked interesting. He also – furtively – looked up the rent on one-bedroom flats within walking distance of Baker St. Just to see. They were all completely unaffordable.

***

Several weeks passed. John went on a number of dates, and acquired a possible girlfriend, Julie, a vet working in a small-animal hospital, with blond curls, an infectious laugh and a miniscule flat near Highbury tube. Sherlock was in one of his lows, snapping irritably at John, refusing clients before they had got their first sentence out, and spending a great deal of time lying on the sofa. Interesting crimes seemed to be in short supply in London, as the city moved towards summer. So when Julie rang John to say that a friend had got her a half-price deal on a weekend break at a country house hotel in Kent, and would he be interested, John agreed immediately. He’d only been seeing her for two weeks: a bit early for a mini-break, but anything would be better than trying to coax Sherlock out of his sulk. He and Julie had slept together twice, both times after a few drinks, and at night – a bit hasty and awkward, though John wasn’t complaining. Both times had been on weeknights, and she had an early start at work: a weekend hopefully spent in bed together, exploring each other, would surely lead to more. And if Sherlock wanted to see Toby while he was away, his subconscious added, John wouldn’t have to know about it.

But the mini-break was a disaster from the start. The hotel turned out to be the kind of stately home with spa and Michelin-starred restaurant that John knew at a glance he couldn’t afford, even half-price, and would hate. The weather was terrible, the food was pretentious, and it turned out that the amusing banter he and Julie had shared over a few drinks dried up dramatically once they were sober and trapped in the middle of nowhere. On reflection, John thought, as he gazed out at the rain on Saturday while Julie was off being scrubbed with seaweed or something, he should have asked her to turn round half-way there, when she revealed that she was saving up to move to the countryside and start her own practice. She hadn’t directly said so, but this vision obviously involved a cottage with roses round the door and a family, preferably in the near future. It definitely did not involve London or John’s current full-time job looking after a consulting detective with a death wish. And John’s obvious reluctance to talk about exactly what he did for a living, or his flatmate, had clearly made Julie uneasy. They hadn’t even had sex, both using the excuse of too much wine and a lengthy, rich dinner, to cry off.

John’s mobile rang and he reached for it with relief: please God, a case, or even just a Sherlock-related emergency, anything that could get him out of the remainder of this weekend. He didn’t recognize the number, though.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that John, John Watson?’ said a voice that John knew, but couldn’t place. He felt a prickle of foreboding.

‘Yes. Who’s this?’

‘It’s me. Toby.’

‘Toby’, said John, disbelieving. ‘How did you get my number? Has something happened? Is Sherlock OK?’

‘I got it from Sherlock’s phone when he wasn’t looking, last time I was round’. Toby sounded nervous, lacking his usual confidence. ‘Look, he doesn’t know I’m calling you. I haven’t even seen him in three weeks.’

‘Then why are you calling me?’

‘I needed –’ Toby sighed. ‘I wanted to ask you about something.  It’s – quite urgent, but I can’t really talk about it over the phone. I wondered if you’d meet me for coffee today, anywhere you like?’

‘What, right now? How urgent?’ said John. ‘I’m out of London this weekend.’

‘Fuck’, said Toby. ‘I don’t know who else – when are you back?’

John looked at his watch. ‘I’m in Kent. There’s a train every half hour from the local station, so I could get back this afternoon. But if this is some kind of joke – '

‘Really not’, said Toby. ‘That would be fantastic. I promise, it is important. Where can I find you? I could meet you at the station.’

‘I’ll get in to St Pancras’, said John. ‘Should be there by 4.’

‘Then I’ll see you in the champagne bar on the upper level, by the Eurostar’, said Toby, with a touch of his usual swagger. Then his tone changed again. ‘John - please don’t tell Sherlock about this.’

‘Why not?’, said John.

‘Just – trust me on this. I’ll explain when I see you. 4pm, St Pancras. Text if there are any problems with the trains. And thanks – really, thanks for this.’

‘OK’, said John. ‘See you then.’ He hung up, with a sense of unreality, and went to make his excuses to Julie. She was politely furious, but also relieved, he thought, and she pointedly didn’t offer to drive him back to London. One more to add to his list of failed relationships, then. He went to pay the extortionate bill and ring a taxi for the station.

When he got to the bar at St Pancras, Toby was sitting at one of the tables next to the Eurostar trains, fiddling with a croissant and a half-drunk coffee. The bar was noisy, crowded with weekend tourists. Toby looked subdued, hunched over, not his usual peacock self. John ordered a coffee and slid into the seat opposite him. The last time he had seen Toby…. He shook his head slightly to clear the image.

‘So’, he said. ‘What is it?’

Toby looked around, obviously checking for listeners, and John’s gaze followed his. He began to feel alarmed. Toby started shredding his napkin into small pieces.

‘It’s about a friend of mine’, he said.

‘Is this something medical?’, said John, guessing. ‘You wanted to consult me as a doctor?’

‘He was attacked last night’, Toby said. ‘By a client. He’s in hospital, he’s still unconscious. It looks pretty bad, they think.’

‘You want to find out who did it?’, said John. ‘Shouldn’t you go to the police? Or Sherlock, if you don’t want them involved?’

Toby gave a quick, mirthless snort and sat up straighter, looking properly at John. ‘It’s Sherlock I’m worried about’, he said. ‘Chris – that’s my friend – he called me last night and told me he was meeting Sherlock. At the Dorchester. And then they found him tied to a bed there, this morning.’

John felt shock like a physical blow, like being punched in the chest, and then denial: it couldn’t be true.

‘What exactly did he say?’, he asked.

Toby gathered the scraps of napkin into a ball and rolled it between his fingers. ‘He said one of my clients had called and asked to meet him, someone called Sherlock Holmes. He said Sherlock told him we’d been to school together, and that he sounded very public-school, nice deep voice.’ Toby met John’s eyes. ‘Chris was calling to ask if I minded, you see. We don’t usually take on each other’s private clients, not without asking. I told him it was fine. I thought – maybe Sherlock wanted a bit of variety.’

‘But you don’t know that it was really Sherlock on the phone. It could have been someone using his name’, John pointed out.

Toby shook his head. ‘If it wasn’t him, how did he know about me and Sherlock? I’m paid to be discreet. I don’t go around telling everyone my clients’ names’. He frowned slightly, thinking.

‘What is it?’ said John.

‘Nothing’, said Toby. He leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘Look, I don’t want this to be Sherlock, either. But I…’, he trailed off, grimacing.

‘What?’, said John. He was conscious of a growing sense of dread. He didn’t want to hear what Toby was going to tell him.

‘Sherlock’s always been a bit dangerous, you know?’ He looked at John for confirmation, obviously finding it. ‘When we were at school – well, I don’t know if he’s told you this, but he was expelled when he was sixteen. He beat someone up quite badly, this huge sixth-former. One of the masters found Sherlock in the toilets holding a knife to his throat. Of course, it was all hushed up.’

John’s throat was dry. He swallowed. ‘He must have been provoked’.

‘Oh, I’m sure he was’, said Toby. ‘But all the same. When Sherlock asked me for an – appointment – I didn’t know if I should go. I don’t do any heavy stuff, and he seemed a bit as though he might be into, you know, whips, chains, knives, the whole nine yards.’ He gestured expansively. ‘I told him I wouldn’t do that. And he’s never asked, to be fair.  But I don’t know… I mean, obviously he is a bit kinky. And I’ve been doing this a while. There’s this look – I can tell when a client is thinking about hurting me.’ He caught John’s expression. ‘No, I’m not saying Sherlock ever has hurt me. I’ve never thought he was the kind of person who would do that just for kicks, you know? Just – he’s interested. I don’t mind that, adds a bit of edge. But Chris – Chris does do all that. If Sherlock wanted to try something, and it went too far…’ Toby’s voice was shaking slightly. ‘At the hospital, they wouldn’t let me in, but I overheard them talking about knife wounds.’

John picked up his coffee, giving Toby a moment, but he couldn’t drink it. He felt sick.  ‘Why are you telling me this?’, he said.  ‘Why not go straight to the police?’

‘Police’, said Toby, scornfully. ‘They don’t give a flying fuck about what happens to us. Chris isn’t the first to be attacked, you know. There’ve been a couple of others, last few months. That’s also why – I mean, another boy was beaten up in a hotel, Polish boy, not one of my crowd so I didn’t know him well. He went back home afterwards. But I heard on the grapevine that the hotel staff said he came in with someone tall, young, dark curly hair, designer suit, looked like a male model. So I did wonder, a bit. I mean, Sherlock’s been different recently. I thought it was just because – ’ He looked at John, meaningfully. ‘But I wondered. And now’ – he bit his lip – ‘I didn’t warn Chris off.’

‘You really think he did this’, said John.

‘You weren’t there last night, were you?’ said Toby. ‘I was hoping you’d been with him. I thought… you know him better than anyone else. You’ve worked with him. If anyone would know what he’s capable of’. He shrugged.

‘Sherlock wouldn’t hurt anyone unless he had good reason’, said John. But even as he said it, he felt doubts creeping in. Sherlock did hurt people, frequently, when he was on a case: he was a lot stronger than he looked and he could be lethal. John wouldn’t have said that he got off on causing pain, but he had no problem with it. If he thought he could get information out of a suspect, or if someone had threatened John or another person Sherlock considered important, John knew that Sherlock was fine with causing serious damage, that he would take – not pleasure, but satisfaction from it. He was pretty sure that Sherlock wasn’t genuinely a sociopath, but it was impossible to deny that John couldn’t think of many things that he could swear Sherlock would definitely never do, or never had done. He didn’t respect the same lines as most people. And when it came to sex… who knew?   

‘That's what I’m hoping’. Toby pushed his hands through his hair. ‘I can’t go to the police. And anyway, he works with them, doesn’t he? Why would they listen to me over him?’

John thought, bleakly, about how eagerly most of the police Sherlock had worked with would listen to Toby.

‘I’m friends with a detective inspector’, he said. ‘I could ask him about Chris informally, see if he would look into it. Maybe someone at the hotel saw something. Or if they found his phone, they could trace his calls. I don’t think – we shouldn’t assume anything. Sherlock’s got enemies, and a lot of people know his name.’ But how many would know that he regularly saw a rent-boy, John thought, but didn’t add.

‘You’re right’, said Toby, sounding relieved. ‘That would be really great. I’ll ask around too, people will talk to me. Just, if you could leave me out of it, with the police.’ He visibly gathered his armour about him. ‘Bad for business to have that kind of reputation, you know.’ 

John nodded. ‘If I find out anything, I’ll give you a call.’

‘Likewise’, said Toby. ‘God, I’m a nervous wreck over this. I probably look like death warmed up.’ His tone had regained most of its usual confidence.

John looked at him. He had never really thought of Toby as a person before, with his own life and friends outside Baker St and Sherlock.

‘You should be careful’, he said. ‘Your ‘profession’, it’s not safe. Maybe you should get out. If you need help…’

‘Don’t worry, doctor’, Toby said, lightly. ‘Sweet of you to be concerned, but I’m _very_ careful.’ He slid out of the table and stood up. ‘I know you won’t tell Sherlock about this chat, but feel free to tell him we met for coffee. He’ll be horribly jealous.’ He smiled at John, not very sincerely. ‘Speak to you later’, and he strolled off into the crowd.

John sat and watched the trains coming in and departing. It seemed like days ago that he had been looking at the rain in Sussex. He ought to call Greg now, get it over with, but he needed to work out what to say. And he needed to see Sherlock, for reassurance. He stood up and headed home.

***

Sherlock was lying on the sofa, on his front, propped on his elbows, reading a heavy-looking book and twirling a fountain pen between his fingers. John stood in the doorway and looked at him for a moment. His feelings were familiar: affection, irritation, worry. But also unfamiliar, not just the sick anxiety, like a weight in his stomach, of what Toby had told him, but the way in which he was noticing Sherlock – his hair falling over his face, his slim fingers, marked with ink, on the pen, his long legs bent upwards, crossed at the ankle, the space of skin in the neck of his shirt. He knew Sherlock. He knew what toothpaste he used, and what he looked like naked and with his face relaxed in sleep; he knew his favourite kind of underwear, and what he would order in a Chinese restaurant; he knew what Sherlock carried in his pockets, and how to make him laugh. He had trusted Sherlock with his life, and saved his in turn, more than once. Yet he didn’t know enough to tell Toby that he was wrong. After all, just a few months ago, he’d had no idea whether Sherlock even wanted to have sex with men, with anyone, let alone that he’d been having sex with a male prostitute well before John had first met him. In some ways, Toby knew Sherlock better than John, maybe better than John ever would.

Sherlock looked up and frowned at John. ‘You were away’, he said, vaguely.

‘Kent, with Julie’, said John. ‘I did tell you.’ He was relieved to find that his tone came out normal.

‘But you came back early’, said Sherlock, still frowning. ‘Why?’

‘It was a disaster’, said John. ‘We broke up. I don’t really want to talk about it.’ He hoped that whatever emotions Sherlock could see on his face would be put down to another romantic mishap, though he felt that the whole of his conversation with Toby was written on his forehead, in flashing neon letters.  He escaped Sherlock’s scrutiny by going to the kitchen and putting the kettle on, though the last thing he needed was more caffeine. His heart was racing already.

‘What about you?’, he said, trying for casual. ‘Anything happen yesterday? No case?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Were you out anywhere?’ John wondered if this seemed suspicious. Did he usually ask about Sherlock’s evening activities? He couldn’t remember. He was starting to sweat: Sherlock would be able to tell.

‘Are you asking if Toby was round?’, said Sherlock. ‘Don’t _hint_ , John. Subtlety is hardly your forte.’

This was good: Sherlock was in the right area, but on the wrong track. If he put John’s nervousness down to speculations about Toby, that was fine.

‘Well, was he?’ said John.

‘No’, said Sherlock, triumphantly. ‘As a matter of fact, I think I went out’. He sounded vague again.

‘Do you mean that you did go out, or you didn’t?’

‘Why on earth does it matter? I may have gone for a walk, I don’t really recall. I was’ – he gestured towards the book – ‘reading. Since yesterday morning. And thinking. I can’t believe what utter nonsense some of these formulae are, it’s just a question of proving it….’ He scowled.

With a sinking feeling, John thought about Sherlock trying to explain to the police that he’d been so wrapped up in a book that he didn’t recall whether he had left the flat or not, let alone what he had done when he was out.

‘Just trying to make sure you get some fresh air occasionally’, he said. ‘And I thought you might have gone to the shops – looks like we’re out of milk and bread.’

‘Boring’, said Sherlock, returning his attention to his book.

 ‘Right, well, I’ll just – pop out and get some, shall I?’

Sherlock didn’t bother replying. John headed back out. Outside 221, he leant against the railings and took a couple of deep breaths. This was impossible. He was hopeless at lying to Sherlock. Every instinct told him to go back and confront him, see what happened. He certainly hadn’t looked as though he’d spent the previous evening putting someone in hospital, but John remembered the mornings after Toby – Sherlock always looked unmoved and untouched. He didn’t sound as though he was lying, either, but again, it was impossible to tell. About the only concrete evidence John could think of to demonstrate that Sherlock hadn’t done it, was that if he had, it seemed unlikely that he would have left a witness alive who could identify him. And this was not a particularly reassuring thought. 

John walked towards the supermarket, but once inside, he ducked into a quiet corner by the frozen cases to make his call. Greg picked up after the first ring.

‘Hi’, John said. ‘Have you got a minute? I need to talk to you about something.’

‘Urgent?’, said Greg.

‘A bit, yeah.’

‘Hang on a tick. I’ll just take this into my office.’ John heard talking, Greg barking out some instructions, a door opening and closing.

‘Fire away. I’ve got a few minutes, then I’d better get back to this case.’

A few minutes. John took a deep breath. He hadn’t really thought his story through.

‘Um. I met this fr – an acquaintance of Sherlock’s this afternoon, and he told me that another friend of his had been beaten up badly in the Dorchester hotel, last night.’

‘You mean the rent-boy?’, Greg said. ‘Not our division. Unless the poor bugger dies, of course, might get it then. Think the case is with sex offences. Did you say Sherlock knew the victim?’

‘No, no, not at all’, said John, hastily. ‘Just, sounded bad.’ He was aware that this seemed very lame. ‘And also, this acquaintance told me that there’d been another couple of cases, men beaten up, but that they’d never been reported to the police. So I just wondered whether they might be connected.’

‘Just wondered? Is this what Sherlock’s working on? Because Johnson’s probably got it, and there’s no way I can get him to let Sherlock anywhere near the crime scene. You can tell him that from me.’

‘No, Sherlock’s not working on it.’ John was struck with inspiration. ‘I told him about the case, and he said it was boring. But I thought from what I heard that there might be something interesting going on. Sherlock’s been in one of his moods for weeks, he needs something to distract him. If this were a series of crimes, then maybe he’d pick it up.’

‘Yeah?’, said Greg. He sounded skeptical. ‘Look, John, I’d love to help you out, but we’ve got a lot on today. If you want to come in and chat to someone about this case, maybe I could make a couple of calls, but I can’t promise anything. Unless you could get your ‘acquaintance’ in to make a statement, maybe?’

‘I don’t think so’, said John.

There was a noise in the background: Greg put his hand over the phone, and voices murmured. ‘John?’, he said. ‘Got to go, sorry. If it’s really bothering you, maybe we could talk it over at the weekend, yeah? If this bloody case is sorted by then, that is.’ 

‘Yes, that would be – good’, said John, hopelessly.

‘Great, see you then’, said Greg, and hung up.

That really hadn’t gone well. John didn’t know what else he could have said, though. Of course it had been naïve to expect that Greg would jump to help him on a case, when John seemingly had no connection with the victim. People were beaten up and mugged in London all the time, it wouldn’t be a priority. John sighed, and went to get the shopping. If he had to stay in Baker St all evening, he’d definitely end up telling Sherlock everything, whether Sherlock asked him or not. That meant he’d need to be out, which meant either calling Harry and meeting her, for a drink that would inevitably turn into dinner, or sitting in a pub on his own. And given that he wanted to do anything rather than be alone with his thoughts, Harry it was. He took out his phone, and started to text.

***

John got through the evening and night without seeing Sherlock at all, and when he got up, he went straight out for breakfast. Sherlock’s bedroom door was closed, and there was no sign of him. He’d texted John twice the night before: ‘Where are you? – SH’, ‘Assistance required – SH’ . ‘Out with Harry’ and ‘With what?’, John had texted back, but Sherlock hadn’t replied. Probably sulking. John kept his phone in reach as he read the papers. The temptation to call Toby was strong, but then he would have to confess that he’d got nowhere with the police. And he ought to leave Toby time to make his own enquiries.

It was nearly lunchtime when his phone finally rang, and he still hadn’t been home. It wasn’t Toby but Greg.

‘What’s up?’, John said. Maybe Greg had spoken to his colleagues.

‘John’, said Greg. He sounded serious. ‘I need to have a word with you. I’m at the Savoy – can you get yourself over here?’

‘OK. I haven’t got Sherlock, though – is he with you?’

‘No, can’t get through to him. And it’s actually you I want to talk to. Tell you what, give me your location and I’ll send a car.’

‘Right’, said John. He gave the details and hung up. Only then did he take in the implications. The Savoy. The Dorchester. ‘Fuck’, he said quietly. He had a bad feeling about why Greg had called him.

Sure enough, when they pulled up at the Savoy in a patrol car, there were police at the entrance, besides a concierge literally wringing his hands, and Greg was in the foyer, looking harassed in the middle of a knot of gesturing hotel staff. He saw John and came straight over.

‘What’s going on?’, said John.

Greg blew out a breath. ‘You’d better see for yourself. Let’s go up’. They rode the lift to the tenth floor in an uncomfortable silence. When they exited, there were more police in the corridor, and scene of crime officers. One of the room doors was open, a little way along the corridor.

‘Come and take a look’, Greg said. ‘I won’t make you suit up, but for God’s sake don’t touch anything.’

John went with him to the open door. He knew what he was expecting to see, had been expecting since he arrived at the hotel, and it took him a couple of seconds to register that there wasn’t a body in the room. Relief hit him, but then he took in a little more, a familiar charnel-house smell, rusty stains on the bed, and on the cream carpet, handcuffs hanging from one of the bedposts. One of the bedside lamps was on the floor, smashed, and a small table was lying on its side. Clothes were scattered about, and only a foot from John was a familiar leather bag, lying on its side. Two officers were going through the room, slowly, bagging things. Beside him Greg gestured to one of them, and she brought over something in a plastic evidence bag and handed it to John: some kind of business card, printed with a phone number and a photo of Toby, lying on a bed, nude.

‘This man checked in last night’, said Greg. ‘Never checked out.’ It was a ridiculous photo, John thought irrelevantly. Something was nagging at him. He looked past the card at the carpet, at a white shirt marked with brown stains lying next to Toby’s bag. He knew that shirt. Three days ago, he’d picked it up from the laundry and left it on Sherlock’s bed. Yesterday, Sherlock had been wearing it on the sofa, getting ink all over the cuffs. He could see the marks from here.

At that everything snapped into focus, a rush of adrenaline: Sherlock. He staggered slightly, dizzy, dropping the card as though it had burnt him. Greg caught him by the elbow – he’d been saying something, but John hadn’t heard any of it.

‘Steady on’, Greg said. ‘You OK? Come on, let’s get out of here. Do you need to sit down?’

John slid down onto his haunches in the corridor and breathed into his clasped hands. He thought he might faint, or throw up, the scent of blood still in his nostrils, but another part of him, the more controlled part, knew that he had to get out of here and find Sherlock. That was the priority. Find Sherlock, and then – he didn’t know what then. Drag him to the nearest police station? Go on the run with him?

‘Jesus Christ’, he said. Swearing was a relief. ‘Fucking hell, fucking, fucking hell.’

‘You recognize the picture, then?’, said Greg. ‘Thought you must, not like you to come over all funny at crime scenes.’ He extended a hand and helped John up. ‘Seemed a bit of a coincidence, you calling yesterday, and then the maid walking in on this scene this morning. Similar location to the Dorchester case, same MO, we think, and if the stuff we found belongs to the this guy he’s definitely a high-class rent-boy. Except this time, he’s disappeared.’

‘Are you- ' said John. He had to pause. 'Are you looking for someone injured, or for a body?’

Greg’s expression tightened. ‘I won’t sugar-coat it for you. Body, most like. There’s a lot of blood on the bed. Someone didn’t walk out of here under their own steam, and assuming the blood's from one person, best guess is they wouldn't have survived outside a hospital. We’ve checked all the London hospitals - nothing doing - and we're searching every bloody room in the hotel and going through the CCTV now.’

John swallowed, feeling sick again. It was obviously too late for him to deny everything, and whatever he thought of Toby, he wouldn’t do that to him, anyway.

 ‘I don’t know his second name’, he said. ‘He’s called Toby. He’s the one who told me about the other cases. The Dorchester one – Chris – is a friend of his.’

‘Was’, said Greg, grimly. ‘Chris died last night, never regained consciousness. Your case certainly got interesting: we think we might be looking at two counts of murder, now.’

‘Fuck’, said John. He had a thought. ‘Did you find a phone? I’ve got Toby’s number in mine.’

‘Phone and keys, just going through it. Two credit cards belonging to a T. King in a trouser pocket, but no wallet. Full set of clothes, including shoes – and he arrived with just the bag you saw in the room, so he didn’t bring extras.’ Greg looked at John, searching his face. ‘We’ll get you on the record later, but is there anything helpful you can tell me now? We could be on a time-limit, here. If he was very badly hurt but still breathing...’

Yes, thought John. Sherlock was fucking Toby. Apparently he’s into kinky sex, with prostitutes. Toby thinks – thought - he was the one who killed Chris. In case you don’t recognize it, that’s his shirt on the floor. And if anyone could make a body disappear from a central London hotel room into thin air, who else but Sherlock Holmes?

‘Sorry’, he said. Greg was still looking at him, waiting for an answer. ‘This is a bit of a shock, I’m not sure what to say.’

‘This Toby, you said he’s an acquaintance of Sherlock’s?’

Fuck, fuck. ‘Yes. He’s – come round to the flat a couple of times. I think he and Sherlock went to school together.’

Greg’s eyebrows rose. ‘Seriously?’, he said.

‘He – Toby – he’s pretty well-off. Posh. Lives near Sloane Square, Sherlock said.’

‘Did you know he was a rent-boy?’

John scrubbed a hand through his hair, buying time. ‘Not until he told me yesterday. Sherlock didn’t mention it.’

‘He must have known though, right? He’d have been able to tell?’

John shrugged.

‘OK’, said Greg, ‘you met him a couple of times at the flat’. He took out a notebook and pen from his pocket, leafing over the pages. ‘When was this?’

‘I don’t know exactly’, said John, cautiously. ‘I couldn’t tell you the dates. Maybe a few months ago. And last month, briefly.’

‘And you saw him yesterday?’

‘Yes, he called me. I was pretty surprised, but I met him for a quick coffee.’

‘No offence, but why did he want you, if he wanted to talk to someone about what happened to his friend? Why not Sherlock?’

John furrowed his brow as though thinking hard. ‘I don’t know. Sherlock’s not exactly sympathetic. Maybe he thought it would be easier to tell me first, so that I could pass it on to him?’

‘And you did pass it on to him, didn’t you? That was what you said on the phone.’

‘I mentioned it, yeah.’

Greg turned over a page, scribbling. ‘Let me get this clear: you know this Toby through Sherlock. When you saw him at the flat, was he visiting Sherlock? I mean, was it a social call?’

Tread carefully, John thought. ‘I got the impression they had just – bumped into each other. Sherlock didn’t seem to know him all that well.’

‘Where the hell is he, speaking of? Disappearing bodies, just his bloody cup of tea, isn’t it? Half the time I’m throwing him off crime scenes, and the one time he might actually have some useful information, he can’t be arsed to show up.’

‘I don’t know what he’s up to’.

‘Sent him five texts already, and called him twice. Since when does Sherlock not check his messages?’

Fuck, John thought, texts. ‘Assistance required - SH’. With what? What time had Sherlock sent that? Where had he been? And John hadn’t followed it up. He’d been so wrapped up in avoiding Sherlock, he hadn’t thought about why Sherlock hadn’t replied, Sherlock who always replied to texts. Either he was involved in this, John thought, and now he’s ditched his phone and gone; or he wasn’t, and he’s in serious trouble, which I let him get into, without me.

‘I don’t know’, he said again. ‘Is it alright if I go home? I can try and track him down, and give you a call when I’ve found him.’

‘OK’, said Greg. ‘Just don’t go anywhere. We don’t know Toby’s movements last night, other than coming here, which means that you, as of now, are the last person that we know he spoke to. We’ll need to do a formal sit-down interview, probably this evening, unless we find – unless we collar someone straight off.’ He glanced back at the open door. ‘Between you and me, already looks like the other party left a fair bit of evidence, so we’re hoping to get to him quickly and shake a confession out of him.’

John nodded. He peeled himself off the wall.

‘Need a lift back?’, said Greg. ‘No offence, but you look like shit.’

‘No, I’ll walk to the tube. Fresh air’ll sort me out.’

‘Thanks for coming down, then. Give me a call, anything else occurs to you. Anything at all, John.’ He clapped a hand on John’s shoulder, reassuring, though his tone sounded false. ‘We’re pulling out all the stops here. We’ll find your friend.’

‘He’s not my friend’, John said. But Greg had already turned away, striding down the corridor, officers straightening up as he approached.  John walked to the lift, legs shaky. He had just lied to the police, to Greg. He had withheld information that might help them to find Toby, dead or alive. He had betrayed Toby’s trust. Sherlock had better be innocent, he thought, or I’ll kill him myself.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to airynothing and Regan_V for excellent beta work on this. Remaining errors are entirely my fault. I'm sorry it took so long to post: RL intervened in various ways, and also it turned out much longer than planned.
> 
> And many thanks if you left a comment on the first part: I haven't had time to reply, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about the comments and appreciating them!

 

John left the hotel and turned down to the Thames, pausing at the balustrade and looking out at the river, trying to get his thoughts in order. He tried Sherlock’s phone: no answer. The Thames flowed on, wide and impassive. How many bodies had it held, or did it hold, how many secrets. John remembered one body, other side of the river, Sherlock’s intent face bending over it. He’d been angry with him then too, unsure, but Sherlock had still made it seem as though no-one and nothing else mattered in the face of his focus and brilliance. John’s agitation subsided into an undercurrent, and he suddenly felt exhausted. It had been a long twenty-four hours. But twenty-four hours was not long enough to alter a fixed opinion.

He didn’t really need to think things through. He’d made his decision already, automatically, by lying to Greg. He was on Sherlock’s side, for as long as Sherlock wanted him there. He had made that choice a long time back, and even if Sherlock were guilty, even if he had killed Toby, and Toby’s friend, there was no point pretending that John wouldn’t try to help him. This was not a comfortable thought, but it was true. In fact, John thought, a substantial part of him _was_ , or had been,assuming that Sherlock was guilty, otherwise he would have gone straight to him with Toby’s accusations. That had been his mistake, and now it might be too late to repair it.

John set off for the Tube, walking as fast as he could without breaking into a jog. Every person loitering on the escalator was agonizing, the wait for the train unbearably drawn-out, the distance from station to flat longer than seemed possible. He let himself in, out of breath, and looked up to see Mrs Hudson coming down the stairs, agitated.

‘Oh John, thank goodness it’s you. Sherlock’s in a terrible state, asking for you, I don’t know what they’ve done to him. His poor head!’

‘They?’, said John, but he was already running up the stairs, brushing past her, bursting into their sitting room. He thought he might find it full of police, but there was only Sherlock, sitting on the sofa, elbows on his knees. There was a smudge of blood on his face and some matted in his hair, and he was incongruously holding a packet of frozen peas to the side of his head; he was wearing his suit jacket and trousers, and no shirt. John couldn’t take his eyes off him. Sherlock looked up at him and made to stand, but then winced and sat down again. ‘Stupid’, he said.

‘Gave me an awful turn’, said Mrs Hudson, coming up behind John. ‘Someone rang the doorbell a few minutes ago, wouldn’t stop, and when I went to give them what for Sherlock was lying on the doorstep, out cold. I don’t mind telling you I thought the worst for a moment, but then he woke up, insisted on dragging himself upstairs to see if you were here. I got him ice, but I don’t think he’s fit to be at home, really I don’t. He won’t let me call an ambulance.’ 

Sherlock met John’s gaze and held it: John nodded, slightly. ‘It’s all right, Mrs H’, he said, steering her gently towards the door. ‘I can patch him up here, and you should go and have a rest downstairs and some sweet tea for the shock. I’ll come down and check on you as soon as I’ve sorted him out. Head injuries always look worse than they are, you know.’

‘You boys and your cases’, she said. ‘You need to take more care of yourselves.’ Her eyes were shrewd. ‘I’ll just be in my sitting-room, then, if you need me.’

‘Thanks’, said John. He waited until she was half-way downstairs, and then crossed to sit beside Sherlock. Sherlock half-turned to face him, awkwardly. John couldn’t read his expression.

‘Tell me’, he said quietly.

‘Stupid’, said Sherlock. For a moment John thought it was addressed to him, then he realized Sherlock was talking about himself. 

‘John’. He hesitated. ‘You have to believe me.’

‘I believe you’, said John.

‘How can you just – ’ said Sherlock. He reached out with his free hand and gripped John’s wrist: John looked at his hand, but didn’t try to pull away. ‘You don’t even know what I’m talking about.’

John moistened his lips. ‘If it’s about Toby, and the Savoy Hotel, then I’ve just come from there’, he said.

Sherlock dropped John’s wrist, fast, and raised his hand to his mouth, pressing it. His eyes flicked over John, deducing. ‘How did you –‘ , he said, and then ‘Stupid, stupid, how could I not have seen this.’

John was conscious that his pulse was racing, his mouth dry. ‘Just tell me’, he said.

Sherlock exhaled, perhaps a bit shakily. He leant over again so that his elbows were propped on his knees, and his hair hid part of his expression. ‘Last night, I got a text, from Toby. Seemingly. Sent at 10:21. It said to meet him at the Savoy, 951, urgently.’

‘Was that when you texted me?’

‘No’, said Sherlock, reluctantly. ‘That was a bit before. I couldn’t find my microscope slides.’ His eyes slid sideways to John, guilty.

‘I see’, said John. ‘Go on.’

Sherlock looked back down. ‘I assumed he was exaggerating, as usual. But I went to the hotel. And when I knocked on the door’, he shrugged, indicating his head. ‘Someone opened it, dragged me in, knocked me out. Three men, I’ve got approximate build, height and weight, and the hair gel on the largest suggested their provenance was former USSR, but the room was dark, so I couldn’t – I might have damaged one of them, but they were quick. And they knew what they were doing. I was out until I found myself on the doorstep.’ He looked at John, expression frustrated. ‘I could see that the light was out, and I knocked on the door anyway – of all the _idiotic_ things to do. I deserved this. I know it sounds implausible, but that’s it. I have a number of theories, of course. But I take it from your expression that you already know why they took my shirt and coat. And phone.’

‘Yes’, said John, feeling almost painful relief and anxiety. He wanted to touch Sherlock. He reached out and put a hand on his sleeve. ‘And I do believe you. But it sounds completely fucking implausible, and we have a serious problem. The police think Toby was at the Savoy last night, tenth floor, didn’t get the room number, but he’s either been killed or seriously injured and he’s gone from the room. It’s’ - John stopped, remembering, ‘– there’s blood everywhere. Handcuffs, that kind of thing.’ He tightened his grip on Sherlock’s jacket. ‘Your shirt was on the floor. Someone’s trying to set you up for this. Moriarty or, or someone else.’

‘Not Moriarty’, said Sherlock. ‘This isn’t his style: not subtle enough, no finesse. No, we’ll know when it’s him.’ He met John’s eyes. ‘I see you thought I did it.’

‘OK, yes’, said John, letting go of Sherlock. ‘For a moment. Toby rang me yesterday and I met him for coffee. He told me some, some stuff.’ He wanted to tell Sherlock everything that Toby had told him, but there might not be time. ‘Someone hurt – killed – a friend of his in the Dorchester on Friday, and they were posing as you when they made the appointment. He said there’d been others, too. He wanted to ask me…’

‘Whether it was likely I would murder someone for my pleasure?’, said Sherlock. ‘Interesting question. I take it that you agreed the answer was yes.’

‘No’, said John. ‘No, that’s not fair. I didn’t – I was just confused by, by everything. I’m sorry, I should have asked you about it. Yesterday.’

Sherlock set down his ice pack on the floor, carefully, and stood up. ‘No need to apologize. I could have done it, you know. And it seems that the evidence is compelling. The police will know by now that I was at the hotel, and I expect they have my fingerprints, hair, blood at the scene, probably my coat and phone – or that would be better, send someone out wearing it, police never look too closely at CCTV as long as someone’s got the right height and hair – dump them in a nearby bin...’

‘Stop’, said John, interrupting. Sherlock still looked a bit shaky on his feet, otherwise he would clearly have been pacing. John stood up too, to face him. ‘Stop it. What about Toby? How could you have moved the, the body? Or’ – a thought occurred to him – ‘do you think he’s alive? Was he helping them?’

‘Unlikely, but not entirely impossible’, said Sherlock. John wondered which part of his question this referred to. ‘And actually, there are at least five ways I could have done it. But the police are too incompetent to work them out.’ He met John’s eyes, expression unreadable. ‘If you hadn’t already lied to them, you wouldn’t be here. Hence, there’s a possibility they’re not going to think _I_ moved the body. They’re going to think _we_ did it.’

 ‘You’re saying – that we’re in this together?’, said John. ‘That someone’s trying to frame both of us?’

‘No’, said Sherlock. ‘I’m saying that we never had this conversation. You should confess all your worst suspicions to the police, and I’m going to wash, change and disappear before they arrive, which will probably be within the next twenty minutes.’ He started walking towards the bathroom.

John dithered for a minute and then followed him. Sherlock had left the door open, and was already in the shower. ‘Disappear?’, John said, loudly, over the hiss of the water.

‘Not permanently’, Sherlock said. John could only see him as a blurred shape behind the shower curtain. ‘Just until I work a few things out.’ He switched off the shower. ‘Towel’?, he said.

John would normally have objected, but this time he just passed the least damp towel to Sherlock, who was reaching round the curtain. ‘You’re not doing anything else until I check your head’, he warned. ‘I’m not sure you’re fit to go anywhere’.

Sherlock didn’t protest, which was in itself an admission that he was probably in pain. He climbed out of the bath, towel round his waist. John bit his lip. Sherlock almost naked, damp and warm – but now was definitely not the time to think of that. ‘Sit on the loo seat’, he said. ‘Let me look’.

Sherlock sat down and John bent to run his fingers gently over the injury. ‘You’ll have a good lump’, he said. ‘But I think you might get away without stitches. You might still be concussed, though. I’ll find you some strong painkillers, hang on.’ He turned round to reach for them in the cupboard above the sink.

‘I have to be fit to go’, said Sherlock, behind him. John turned back. Sherlock looked up at him. He looked – unexpectedly vulnerable, suddenly, and not just because he was only wearing a towel. ‘I can’t be arrested’, he said.

‘If you are, it’ll be fine’, said John. He was a little surprised: Sherlock had been arrested at least four times in the course of their friendship, and God only knew how many times before that. ‘I can bail you, or - ’ He paused. Did people get bail for murder charges?

‘It won’t be _fine_ ’, said Sherlock. ‘If my hypothesis is correct, I need _time_ , and if they have the evidence they think, the police will scarcely stop to listen.’

‘Can I help?’, John asked. ‘Or Mycroft – surely – ’

‘No’, said Sherlock sharply. His expression twisted. ‘Murdering rent-boys? Mycroft would have even less problem believing that of me than you did.’  John winced.  Sherlock ran a hand through his hair, agitated, and John saw that his arm was shaking slightly, small tremors. ‘He once threatened to have me sectioned, if it was a choice between that and prison. For the sake of the family honour, and so forth.’

Toby’s story about Sherlock’s schooldays went through John’s mind, and he wondered just when Mycroft had made this threat, and why. He couldn’t believe that Mycroft would carry through on it, but there was clearly a history here, and what mattered was that Sherlock believed it.

‘Sherlock’, he said. He set down the painkillers and bent down awkwardly, gripping Sherlock’s shoulders. ‘That won’t happen. I promise.’ Sherlock’s skin felt chilly, now, and he was shivering properly, arms round his chest. Delayed shock?, thought John. ‘We need to get you into warm clothes, some brandy maybe’, he said. ‘I’ll go and – ’

‘No’, said Sherlock again. Unexpectedly, his arms came up and round John, pinning him in an uncomfortable embrace. John bent more, awkwardly, and then slid a knee between Sherlock’s on the toilet seat, so that he could put his arms around him in a proper hug. Sherlock pressed forward against John’s shirt, his head in the curve of John’s shoulder, hair brushing his chin, still shivering, breathing fast. John tried to set aside all his unanswered questions and will warmth and reassurance into him.

Gradually, Sherlock’s breathing calmed, and he felt less cold against John’s chest; he loosened the hug slightly, preparing to stand up, but Sherlock held him in place with some force. He slid one hand up to grip John’s neck, tipped his own head back, pulled John down and then kissed him, lips slightly parted. John made a muffled noise of surprise and jerked away, reflexively, but Sherlock was still holding him in place, leaning up to kiss him again, and he found himself unresisting, more than that, opening his mouth, letting Sherlock in. Sherlock’s tongue moved with his tentatively, deepening the kiss, and it felt as though they were talking, explaining, apologizing. Then Sherlock drew back for breath, leaned in again and kissed John harder, deeply, and suddenly John was aware that his hands were on Sherlock’s naked back, and his knee between Sherlock’s legs – if he pushed forward a bit he might feel – and that Sherlock was only wearing a towel, and that John’s position with one foot on the floor was seriously uncomfortable and he really wanted to climb into Sherlock’s lap and rub against all that skin – and that Sherlock had a head injury and the police were about to arrive and arrest him, or possibly them. He broke off, gasping, and pulled away, letting go reluctantly and standing up.

‘I’m sorry’, said Sherlock. ‘I shouldn’t have….’ The towel was bunched in his lap, not hiding much. John tore his gaze away and blinked at him in incomprehension.

‘ _Thi_ s is when you choose to apologize?’, he said. ‘I was, um, kissing you back. But you’re injured, and you said twenty minutes…’ His brain didn’t feel as though it was working properly. But Sherlock’s face cleared.

‘Poor timing’, he said. It was a question.

‘Pretty fucking terrible, yeah’.

Sherlock nodded, decisively. He stood up, pulling himself together, unselfconscious; he was still mostly hard, reached down for his discarded clothes and shoes and then refastened the towel. ‘You’ll need to lend me some clothes’, he said. ‘Come on’. He squeezed past and made for the stairs. John closed his eyes for a second or two. He could still feel Sherlock’s mouth on his, hard enough to bruise. Then he followed. Sherlock was already in his room, pulling clothes out of drawers. ‘Here, let me’, said John, exasperated. He rummaged for an old hoodie that had always been a couple of sizes too big on him, and after an instant of hesitation, a clean pair of boxers. ‘My jeans won’t fit you’, he said, throwing these to Sherlock, who was drying himself. John averted his eyes. Even if they had just snogged, things were too complicated – Toby was still missing, presumed dead – and he couldn’t stand there and wonder what would happen if he pushed Sherlock down on the bed, it was wrong.

‘My room, second drawer down, back left’, said Sherlock, muffled in the folds of the sweatshirt. John nodded, and ran downstairs, finding a pair of jeans tucked in with Sherlock’s meticulously folded old clothes, picking up the painkillers and a glass of water, and after a few seconds of dithering, his gun, on the way back.

Sherlock was sitting on his bed, hands steepled, a familiar pose made ludicrous by John’s clothes. He reached out a hand for the painkillers and swallowed them dry, standing up to take the jeans and pull them on. John couldn’t remember seeing Sherlock in jeans: he looked odd, but good. He held out the gun, wordless. Sherlock took it and turned it over in his hands before tucking it in his back pocket, where John’s oversize top just covered it. ‘I don’t suppose you have shoes that would fit me’, said Sherlock, frowning at his.

‘You’ll have to make do’, said John. Sirens sounded in the street outside. He went to the window. ‘Two police cars’, he said. Sherlock nodded. ‘I’ll go out through the garrets, over the roofs’.

‘Wait’, said John, feeling panic, there wasn’t time. He took his wallet from his pocket and tossed it to Sherlock, who opened it and took John’s credit card: John supposed he should feel grateful, for once, that Sherlock always seemed to know all his PIN numbers.

‘I won’t be long’, said Sherlock. ‘I have a strong theory about who’s behind this. I just need to double-check some points’.

‘And Toby?’, said John, braced for one of Sherlock’s comments on the pointlessness of caring about where Toby was.

Sherlock hesitated. ‘I don’t – not care’, he said. ‘But I can’t find him unless I find who did this to him.’

John nodded. Sherlock came over to him and gripped his arms, looking at him seriously. His eyes seemed very grey, darker than usual. ‘About timing’, he said.

John licked his lips, involuntarily. ‘We’ll need to talk’, he said. He wanted to kiss Sherlock again.

One corner of Sherlock’s mouth crooked, wry. ‘Later’, he said, and kissed John swiftly. Then he was in the hall, under the trapdoor, saying impatiently ‘Boost me up’. John took his foot in his hands and pushed, and Sherlock shoved the trapdoor up and out of the way with a crash and pulled himself after it. ‘My clothes’, he said, leaning down. John looked at him an instant, confused, and then at Sherlock’s impatient gesture, ran for the bedroom and scooped up the discarded jacket, trousers underwear, throwing them up to him. The doorbell rang downstairs. ‘Hurry’, said John. ‘Put that back’. Sherlock heaved the trapdoor back into place, the last John saw of him his head disappearing into the gloom of the small roofspace. He stood there for a moment, looking up, checking that everything seemed as usual. Then he went downstairs to face the music.

**

The doorbell rang twice more as he clattered down the stairs, and as the front door came into view, Mrs Hudson was opening it. ‘Inspector’, she said. ‘You do look worried, I hope Sherlock hasn’t been up to anything.’

Greg came into the hall, followed by Donovan and another three constables John didn’t recognize. ‘We do need to talk to him urgently’, he said. ‘Is he in?

‘Oh, well’, said Mrs Hudson, vaguely. She glanced towards John, who didn’t dare to change his expression; he was in Greg’s line of sight. ‘Haven’t seen him for a day or two, now I come to think of it’, she said. ‘Always off after something, we never know if he’s coming or going, do we, John?’

‘No’, John agreed, coming down the rest of the stairs. ‘He wasn’t here when I got back’, he said to Greg, ignoring the others. ‘I don’t know where he’s got to.’

‘Right’, said Greg. He looked at John, not unfriendly, but definitely suspicious. ‘We’ve got a search warrant, so if you don’t mind, we’ll just check’.

‘Search warrant?’ said John, trying to sound astonished. He wondered if Sherlock had had enough time to get out of the building.

‘Yes, said Greg. ‘No time for a cuppa, thanks’, to Mrs Hudson, who was hovering beside him. ‘John, you’d better come up with us.’

John had seen police searching the flat before, of course, but this time it was agonizing. He sat at the kitchen table, trying to convey a surface attitude of amenable confusion, but new thoughts kept hitting him, with a jolt every time – what if they checked the roofspace and found something there, what if there was blood in the shower or on the floor, what if Greg had noticed John putting a half-melted packet of frozen veg into the fridge and worked out why it was on the living-room carpet, what if… He didn’t dare follow the police around in case his face gave something away. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, Greg came into the kitchen and leant on the counter, looking at John.

‘You really haven’t seen him’, he said, skeptical.

‘No’, said John. Sherlock had said to talk to the police. He didn’t want to pile up more evidence against him, but he thought Greg could probably tell that he had been lying at the hotel, by now, in any case.

Greg was looking at him narrowly. He was a good detective. ‘Anything else you want to add to what you said earlier?’, he said.

‘I may have left some things out’, said John, evenly.

Greg ran a hand through his hair. ‘Jesus, John’, he said.

John fought back the urge to apologize. It was possible that Greg would never forgive him for this, even if – when – Sherlock was totally vindicated. ‘Maybe we should do this at the station’, he said, instead.

‘Took the words right out of my mouth’, said Greg. ‘John – we’re not arresting you. Yet. I can’t believe that you would – ’

John shook his head, slightly, a warning. Greg blew out a breath. ‘Come with me, then’, he said. ‘This lot can finish up here.’

Greg sat in the front of the police car with an officer, and John in the back. He felt like a criminal. He _was_ a criminal, they could presumably charge him with hindering the investigation, at the least. He looked out at the London streets, where Sherlock was off doing God knows what.

At Scotland Yard, the atmosphere was awkward. On the way to an interview room, they passed a few people John knew, who didn’t seem sure whether they should smile at him or not: clearly news had spread. Greg escorted him into the room and then hesitated. ‘I’ve got to get someone else to conduct the interview’, he said. ‘Might take a few minutes. Do you want anything from the canteen?’

John became aware that he was hungry, starving in fact. ‘Cup of tea and a sandwich would be great, if you’ve got them’, he said.

Greg nodded, visibly restraining himself from saying anything else, and left John there.

When he came back, tossing John a stale cheese sandwich with an apologetic face, and setting down tea for him, he had another DI with him, an older woman, with short steel-grey hair and a forbidding expression, no-one John had met before. ‘Detective Inspector Bloomfield’, Greg said, introducing her, ‘and Sergeant Johnston you know’. John recognized him as someone Sherlock had run off with a well-judged comment several cases back. He looked embarrassed. DI Bloomfield looked at John coolly.

‘Let’s get your details ’, she said, ‘and we’ll start recording. Thanks’ – to Greg – ‘we’ll take it from here’.

Greg nodded, curt, and left. John looked across the table. ‘Is he…in trouble?’, he asked.

‘Why would he be in trouble?’, said Bloomfield, watching him.

‘No reason’, said John.

‘OK then’, she  said, and smiled, without an ounce of friendliness or warmth. ‘Looks like we’re set up. Why don’t you start by giving us a run-through of your relationship with Mr Toby King?’

John nodded, cleared his throat, and began.

When he left the interview room, nearly two hours later, Greg was leaning, faux-casual, by the water cooler just around the corner. ‘Give you a lift back?’, he said.

‘Thanks’, said John. He wasn’t sure what was meant , but when Greg led him to the car park and to his own car, he felt a shred of relief: perhaps some of their friendship was intact. He stayed wary, though, as he got into the front seat of the car and Greg pulled out into traffic, unspeaking.  In the interview, Bloomfield hadn’t given away anything about what might have been found in Baker St, or not, assuming she knew. She had focused, unsurprisingly, on the fact that Sherlock had been having sex with Toby, and on John’s whereabouts the previous night. John had been steeled for them to confront him with the evidence of Sherlock’s involvement, so when she’d left the room for a moment and come back with Sherlock’s coat, dirty and stained, he was prepared. She was looking for shock or guilt, but what he mostly felt was anger, that someone had dared to take something that mattered to Sherlock, that he cared for, and a kind of pain in seeing such a familiar object mishandled.

‘We have fingerprints’, she’d said, quietly. ‘DNA tests under way on blood found in the room. Considerable amounts of trace evidence. We don’t need to build a case, no jury wouldn’t convict on what we already have. But what we need you for, John, is to help us to find the man we both know did this, so that he can tell us what happened in that hotel room.’

‘He didn’t do it’, said John.

‘Hard to convince us of that, when he seems to have disappeared, isn’t it?’

Because you wouldn’t have given him a chance, even after all he’s done for you, thought John, but he didn’t say it. Any response would give them more leverage. Bloomfield seemed undecided on the question of John’s involvement, though she was obviously smart enough that she could be faking it. She’d also dropped a few hints about how ‘close’ John and Sherlock were; John didn’t know if he was reading these as suggestive because the afternoon’s events had made him paranoid, or not.

Beside him, Greg cleared his throat. ‘Mycroft rang’, he said.

‘Oh?’, said John. He thought about why Mycroft might have rung Greg rather than him.

‘He said’, said Greg, deftly switching in and out of lanes and staring down a black cab, ‘he said he was looking for Sherlock too.’

‘Did he… say what he would do when he found him?’

‘Not as such. He told me to inform him immediately if wefound him’, said Greg. He pulled up outside 221B. ‘Told, not asked, that is.’ He switched off the engine and turned to John. ‘I’m in enough trouble over this already. And I’m telling you, one hundred per cent off-record, just in case you’ve got other thoughts: I don’t want to believe Sherlock’s guilty. I’m not denying there are those that do, and there’s a shitload of evidence that even he’ll have some trouble talking away. If he shows up – ’. He hesitated. ‘My job’s on the line here. Tell him I won’t hand him over to Mycroft if he’d prefer to take his chances with us, and I’ll be honest about the times he’s helped me, but that’s it.’ He met John’s eyes. ‘I don’t want to know if you’re in contact with him, but be careful.’

‘You mean, don’t cross Mycroft’, said John.

‘About it, yeah’, said Greg. ‘He didn’t mention you at all. Thought that wasn’t a good sign.’

John opened his mouth to protest that he had no idea where Sherlock was (which, after all, was true at that precise moment) and then closed it again. Greg was presumably risking something just driving him home, and there was no point lying if he didn’t have to. ‘Thanks’, he said, instead. ‘I appreciate the warning. And the lift.’

‘Yeah, well’, said Greg. ‘Maybe I don’t fancy spending Sunday nights slagging off Arsenal down the pub on my own.’ He sighed. ‘It’s always too late to say this, with you and Sherlock, but don’t do anything stupid.’

John remembered Sherlock’s mouth under his, how he tasted. Much too late. He reached for the door handle. ‘I’ll bear it in mind’, he said, ducking out.

Greg grimaced, obviously interpreting this correctly, and pulled away, back into traffic. John looked after him, and then at his watch. It wasn’t even 6pm. He was, unromantically, still starving. He let himself in, hoping the police hadn’t disturbed his pile of takeaway menus.

***

On the whole, they’d put things back where they found them, John thought, but to someone who lived in the flat, it was obviously a bit off-kilter, partly because the police had put all the papers in much neater piles than Sherlock ever managed. John wandered round the flat, eating his noodles from the carton, checking. They’d taken Sherlock’s laptop: he couldn’t tell if anything else was missing. He stood in the doorway of Sherlock’s room, but didn’t go in. Whatever secrets Sherlock might have in here, the police knew them by now, but it still wasn’t John’s right to know. Only a few hours ago, he’d been almost on the verge of having sex with Sherlock: now, in the quiet of the evening, it seemed unreal. John’s mental image of Sherlock and sex – what he’d seen of Sherlock, actually having sex, he corrected himself – had primed him, he thought, to accept what Toby had told him. He could easily imagine Sherlock as scary, kinky, interested in pain. He couldn’t reconcile that Sherlock with a Sherlock who was scared himself, who held on to John for comfort, who kissed him and then apologized – apologized! Maybe that was Sherlock with head trauma, and the other was real. Maybe that was Sherlock letting his guard down, and the other was an act. Maybe John had fantasized the whole encounter. Maybe he would find out one way or the other, tomorrow, or the next day, or in the very near future; or maybe Mycroft and/or the police would find Sherlock, now carrying a loaded weapon, thanks to John, and John would be visiting him in prison or in a locked ward for the next decade or so.

The flat felt cold and cheerless. John frowned at these maudlin thoughts, and switched on the TV for company. He channel-surfed aimlessly for hours, until the ten o’clock news came on. Toby’s mysterious disappearance, or rather the ‘mysterious disappearance of high-class male escort Toby King’ was the leading headline. There was Bloomfield, at a press conference. ‘We have some very strong leads and are particularly interested in questioning one man, known to have been at the Savoy last night, about his movements. We would urge him to come forward and assist us with our investigation’. Cameras flashed. ‘Are you going to release his name?’, one reporter shouted. John thought he saw Bloomfield hesitate a moment. ‘That would be detrimental to our investigation at present’ (Mycroft, John reckoned) ‘…but we will be holding a further press conference at midnight tonight.’ So Sherlock probably had until midnight before his face was splashed across the media.

John badly wanted a drink, several, but he was aware that the police could come back at any moment, or Sherlock, needing his help. He rubbed the back of his neck. It had been…three nights since he’d had a decent amount of sleep and if this hadn’t been quite the longest day of his life (to be fair, there was a lot of competition, including getting shot and having a bomb strapped to him), it was certainly up there among them. He couldn’t stay up till midnight, he would go to bed, sensibly, and when he couldn’t sleep, as seemed probable, he’d just get up again.

In the event John fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow, deeply and dreamlessly. When he woke up in the pre-dawn light and realized he’d slept the night through, he felt faintly disgusted with himself. Surely he should have been pacing the floor all night, thinking up ways to help Sherlock or at least being traumatized by his friend’s (lover’s?) situation and by the possible violent death of that friend’s friend (lover?). And also, more proof that his body experienced acute stress as calming was not really what he needed right now.

At least the Met hadn’t found him sleeping like a baby. He swung out of bed and down to the kitchen, filling and switching on the kettle automatically, lifting the teapot from the shelf, fishing for a teabag in the canister. His fingers met stiff paper and time stopped for a moment with a jolt, and then restarted. His heart was hammering. He lifted the paper out and unfolded it: Sherlock’s familiar scrawl. No greeting, naturally, no ‘Don’t worry, I’m fine’.

‘Your laptop’, it said, and then two short nonsense words, with numbers and letters and random symbols mixed up – John blinked at them and they clarified into sense, oh, right, a username and password, presumably, though he didn’t know for what. He hoped Sherlock hadn’t somehow sensed this moment of idiocy. Below this, a terse sentence: ‘If affirmative, text this number. Log out immediately, destroy note.’ John didn't recognize the number, Sherlock must have acquired a phone somehow.

 Affirmative? John picked up his laptop, which was already on. He’d definitely turned it off before going to bed. He considered a moment, and then looked up his browser’s history, to find that someone had been on a ‘BBC webmail’ site at 3am. Sherlock had hacked into the BBC? What for?  John went to the site, laboriously typed in the username and password as requested, and was in to a standard email account. There was only one message in the inbox, flagged as urgent. He clicked on it, fingers steady.

‘Hi Anna,

Yes, that’s him. Hope you get the son of a bitch. Keep me posted,

Jeff’

That was it, no indication of what ‘Jeff’ was replying to. Anna?, thought John, bemused. Anyway, it seemed pretty affirmative. John felt a stirring of hope. This sounded as though Sherlock knew who he was looking for and had definite evidence. He acutely wanted to explore the email account and find out more, but Sherlock had said to log out – could Mycroft track his internet use? A disturbing thought. He exited the mail programme and reached for his phone. Should he type in the whole message? No, Sherlock just wanted to know that the answer was yes. Should he...add anything?

‘Jeff says ‘Yes’. Hope you are OK’, he sent. His phone beeped less than twenty seconds later. ‘Working. Later –SH’. Later, as in a reference to what he’d said the day before, wondered John, or would he literally see Sherlock later that day? He looked at the note. This message will self-destruct in five seconds, he thought. Sherlock wouldn’t have got that joke, of course. He ripped it into small pieces and went to flush them down the loo, then he went back to the tea. Sherlock had known he’d find his note within a few minutes of getting up. The thought made him smile, though knowing that Sherlock had visited the flat in the middle of the night and not woken him created more conflicting feelings. At least he’d been able to do something helpful, though why Sherlock hadn’t just gone to an internet café if his phone couldn’t handle it – oh.

John turned on News 24. Even expecting it, it was surreal to see a photo of Sherlock as backdrop to the presenters. They had picked a photo of him at his most arrogant and forbidding, wearing the expression that indicated disdain at the world’s stupidity, blown up from some press conference a couple of months back. As John watched, not hearing the presenters, the photo was replaced with one of Toby, semi-nude. He looked as though he should be advertising underwear on a billboard. This was going to attract a lot of attention, thought John, his heart sinking. Neither criminals nor their victims usually looked that good, and the commentators were having a field day with Sherlock’s website and the fact that he and his ‘alleged victim’ had met at a ‘£30,000 per year private school’: it was the dream story, illicit sex, murder and the upper classes. He switched off and went to check out the windows. There was a police car parked across the road, but no reporters were visible. Yet. It wasn’t hard to find Sherlock’s address, and they would know about John from his blog.

John stood and looked out at the familiar street. Things weren’t going to be the same after this. But then, no-one could say that signing up to live with Sherlock had been a passport to an ordinary life; he’d gone into it with his eyes open. He went to see what Twitter had to say.

The rest of the day was notable in its complete lack of developments. Things John didn’t do, although he very much wanted to: text Sherlock again; ring him; ring Greg; ring Mycroft; go down to the Yard and demand to be told what was going on; write a blog post asserting Sherlock’s innocence; answer the doorbell to the reporters now visible huddled on the doorstep. Things he did do: read endless speculation about Sherlock (and, always secondarily) himself on the internet until he felt nauseous; patiently answer a series of increasingly hysterical phone calls from Harry without giving anything away; eat almost all of a cake supplied sympathetically by Mrs Hudson, who came in, left it in front of him, and patted him on the shoulder while he was mid-phone call. He kept the news on in the background, but there were no developments. By late afternoon they had been reduced to a lot of guff about Oscar Wilde, rent-boys and the Savoy. John wasn’t sure if Sherlock would find the comparison flattering or not. He didn’t leave the house. He waited for something to happen until 2am, and then gave up and went to sleep.

He woke what seemed a few minutes later to someone shaking his shoulders. He threw up an arm to get them in a neckhold – and then registered that he was gripping his own sweatshirt and Sherlock was talking to him.

‘John’, said Sherlock. ‘I need you. Come on, we have to go right now.’

‘Right, coming’, said John, his tongue thick in his mouth. He shook his head to try to clear it. Something hit him in the chest, Sherlock was tossing him clothes. ‘Come _on_ ’, he said. John struggled blearily out of his pyjamas and into the top and jeans Sherlock had given him, almost falling off the bed as he tried to find his shoes. ‘Here’, said Sherlock, handing him some old trainers. John shoved his feet into them, never mind the laces, and Sherlock was already pulling him up, pushing him out the door. ‘Wait, said John, ‘police – outside’.

‘I wasn’t planning to walk out of the front door’, said Sherlock. ‘Here, you first’. John looked at him for a moment and then realized Sherlock was holding his hands for John to step into them – roof, then. He pushed himself up and through the trapdoor, and then looked down at Sherlock, realizing belatedly that he wouldn’t be able to pull him up. But Sherlock was already fetching John’s bedside table, with a crash, stepping gracefully onto it, and reaching for the edge of the opening, hoisting himself up with a grunt. They moved through the dark roofspace, John stumbling over unseen obstacles, and Sherlock led him out through a small skylight that took them down to the edge of the roof at the back of the houses, a precarious walk along, and then down an old fire-escape. The night air was starting to wake John up. ‘Where are we going?’, he said. ‘What time is it?’

‘Heathrow’, said Sherlock. He pulled up the hood of the sweatshirt. ‘Taxi’s too risky, we’re taking the train. Save your breath: we’ll only make it if we run.’

John barely had time to nod before Sherlock took off at a steady pace, loping through the alleyways and quiet streets. It was odd not following his coat-tails, John thought, trying to keep up. He registered that they were heading for Paddington, and that the streets were largely empty and the first traces of dawn were in the sky, must be around 4am or so, but most of his energy was concentrated on not losing Sherlock. Sherlock took the steps into the station three at a time and without pausing to check the boards, ran across the concourse and vaulted over the barriers to the Heathrow Express platform. John did likewise: he always enjoyed this particular part of the chase. They leapt onto the train and the doors slid shut behind them.

John staggered to the nearest seat and collapsed. He was pretty used to sprinting through London, but he usually didn’t do it a minute after waking up from deep sleep. Sherlock slid into the seat opposite, eyes scanning the carriage, which was empty apart from a suited man apparently fast asleep. John looked at him, still catching his breath. He had dark circles under his eyes and the fine bones of his face stood out sharply.

‘You haven’t slept or eaten, have you’, he said.

‘No time’, said Sherlock.

‘You’ve seen the news?’, said John.

Sherlock jerked his head towards something behind John; he turned around and saw that the news was playing on the carriage’s television, Sherlock’s photo there briefly before they switched to the next item.

‘OK’, said John. He looked at his watch, 4:32am. The train was sliding out of the station. His breathing had steadied, but adrenaline was still rushing through his veins. If it wasn’t for Sherlock’s precarious situation, he would have said that he felt good, it was good to be doing something, and to be doing it with Sherlock.

‘Tell me what’s needed’, he said.

Sherlock looked approving. ‘I need you to get someone out of Departures before he boards the plane’, he said. ‘Marcus Stedman. He’s on the 7:30am flight to Moscow, terminal 5, British Airways. You’ll almost certainly find him in the first class lounge. I’ve got your passport here, and a ticket to Edinburgh.’

‘Edinburgh?’, John said. ‘You don’t want me to get on his flight?’

Sherlock shook his head, impatient. ‘If he leaves the country, I’ve lost’, he said. ‘You might fancy a trip to Scotland in that case, of course. I’m assuming the police told you not to leave the UK, so if your passport is flagged – unlikely, but not impossible – you won’t technically be doing anything illegal. If necessary, invent a dying aunt.’

The police had told him not to leave Baker St, John thought, and look at him now. ‘OK’, he said. ‘Extract Marcus Stedman, got it. How will I know him?’

Sherlock smiled, humourless. ‘He looks like me’, he said. ‘But younger, twenty or so. Tall, dark, thin. You can send me a picture if you’re not sure, but you’ll know him. I brought your phone’ – he fished in a pocket and passed it over – ‘so we can stay in contact. When you find him, I’ll talk to him. There’s a very high probability that he’ll come willingly after that. But you’ll need to persuade him to listen, and make sure he doesn’t try to run instead.’

‘Once we get him out, what happens?’, said John. ‘Police?’

‘Not yet’, said Sherlock. ‘He wasn’t acting alone.’ He hesitated.

‘Are you going to tell me?’, said John.

‘In due course. But now- ', he looked behind John, and John turned: the guard was coming down the train, checking tickets. Sherlock extracted John’s wallet and passport from his jeans pocket and tossed them to him, then slouched in the seat, pulled up his hood further and slumped against the window. The guard drew level.

‘Two singles, please’, said John. ‘We were in a bit of a rush, getting on.’

The guard, bored, nodded and took John’s card, issuing the tickets. She barely glanced at Sherlock. John exhaled as she moved on to the next carriage. He looked at Sherlock, ready to ask more about what he had been doing for the last twenty-four hours. Sherlock didn’t move. His eyes were closed, his breathing regular: he seemed to have slipped into genuine sleep. Exhaustion, John thought, studying the slice of his face that was visible: when Sherlock did sleep, he could sleep anywhere. It was hard to study him properly when he was awake, his mobile face constantly shifting. John looked his fill now, trying to imprint on his memory Sherlock’s eyelashes, his cheekbone, the curve of his lips in repose. ‘If he leaves, I’ve lost’, Sherlock had said. Well, he wouldn’t leave, even if John were arrested in the process. Sherlock hadn’t said this Stedman necessarily had to be uninjured. Improvise, John thought. He took out his phone and started looking for plans of Terminal 5, settling into the familiar poise of readiness for action.

Sherlock woke with a slight start as the train pulled in to the terminal. He glanced a question at John. ‘It’s fine’, John said. ‘You needed to sleep.’

Sherlock made a face but didn’t protest. They left the train and followed signs for the terminal, walking with purpose. John paused at the automatic check-in machines, glancing at Sherlock. ‘On your credit card’, said Sherlock. John waited for the machine to print out a pass. ‘It’ll take me a while to get through security’, he said. ‘Get something to eat and drink: you can’t help me if you’ve passed out. I’ll ring from the other side.’ He fished in his wallet and passed Sherlock a crumpled note.

Sherlock nodded, acknowledging that John was in charge: after the last two days of powerlessness, the sense of control was a rush. They got to the check-in area, even at this time in the morning, it was busy, with groups of weary-looking tourists and large families queuing at the desks, small queues at security, though, which was good.

‘OK’, said John. ‘I’m going through, then.’ He looked at Sherlock. He didn’t want to say goodbye, and he didn’t have the nerve to kiss Sherlock in daylight, in a public place – wouldn’t do much to keep them low-key, either. ‘I’ll see you soon’, he said instead.

‘Good hunting’, said Sherlock, serious, and watched John present his passport and papers to the man at the desk, who checked them briefly and then gestured him through. John let out a breath: first hurdle. He turned and caught Sherlock’s eyes, a brief flash of connection, and then went on to join the queue. He could feel the focus that came in the moment before the battle, where everything was centred on the necessary preparations and a calm descended. He checked himself over, as the line moved sluggishly through. No luggage might have seemed suspicious, but was just plausible on a trip to Edinburgh; according to his ticket he was returning the same night.

He reached the scanners and put his stuff into a plastic tray to go through, walking through the security gate without problems. The biggest issue, he thought, was that no-one was going to let him into a first-class lounge dressed in his shabbiest jumper and an old pair of jeans. He needed a more convincing persona and ideally a weapon; he ran through possibilities, considering, while ostensibly studying the departures board. His phone rang.

‘Impatient’, he said. ‘I’m just through.’

‘He’ll be in the lounge in 5B’, said Sherlock.

‘International departures, I know’, said John. ‘I’m working on it now. Is he dangerous?’

‘Not as dangerous as you’, said Sherlock, matter-of-fact.

John raised his eyebrows, though Sherlock couldn’t see him. He hardly ever spoke to Sherlock on the phone. It felt – oddly intimate, flirtatious. ‘Pretty flattering’, he said.

‘I don’t flatter’, said Sherlock. ‘But yes, you know I like that about you’.

 ‘Yes’, said John. His voice came out rough. There was a pause. He could hear Sherlock breathing over the phone.

‘This is distracting’, John said. ‘I should – I’m going to hang up. Text if it’s urgent, otherwise I’ll ring again when I’ve found him.’ Or if I can’t, he thought, but didn’t say.

‘I have a plan’, said Sherlock.

‘Of course you have a plan’, said John. ‘But since you can’t get through security, I’m the one who’s doing the planning. And I can’t carry out my plan and flirt with you at the same time.’

There was another loaded silence. John grinned. ‘Fine’, said Sherlock, bitten off. ‘Carry on’.

‘Eat something’, said John, and cut the call off. He looked around. The shops were just opening for the day. The restaurants would have real cutlery…he hesitated, indecisive. Clothes first. The nearest shop that had suits was Burberry: he winced, but there wasn’t time to shop around. He picked the first suit and shirt he could see in his size, navy and light blue, and put them on his card, averting his eyes from the total. Thankfully it went through. He remembered Sherlock sitting on his bed, and looked at his shoes, which were his oldest pair of trainers. New shoes too, then: he felt slightly panicked, for the first time, but there was a shop two down with plain brogues; he didn’t even look at the name. A laptop bag from Dixon’s, and he was done.

By now the pub was open, a couple of breakfast drinkers or nervous flyers nursing their pints. John went to the bar and, after a brief survey, ordered a Corona and sat down with it at a table a safe distance from the bar. He drank it as fast as he could without seeming suspicious. Then he waited a moment, watching the bartenders. No-one was paying him any attention. He slipped the bottle into his bag and stood to go, following the signs for the disabled loo. People probably changed in these toilets all the time, but he had to be quick anyway; Moscow would likely be called for boarding within the next half hour at most.

He changed rapidly, stuffing his jeans into the laptop bag. Now the trickier part. He took out the empty bottle. With bored soldiers in the desert, drunk on crates of Budweiser donated by the Americans, it had been a party trick: fill a bottle with water up to the right level, slam your hand on the top, and the bottom falls out of it. He’d been able to do it along with them, but that was a while ago. He turned on the taps and filled the bottle, then held one hand under the dryer, which sprang to life with a roar, and hit the bottle hard with his open hand. It took two tries, but then the glass fell out of the bottom, leaving jagged edges. John looked at them: it would do. He hid the bottom of the bottle in the bin and put the remainder in his bag, then washed his hands. The man looking at him in the mirror was familiar, but his hair should be shorter, he should be more tanned, and he certainly shouldn’t be wearing a posh suit. John tilted his head at his reflection, almost a salute, and left, checking his watch and walking quickly to the right part of the terminal. 

The first-class lounge was easy to find, and as expected, there was a smiling receptionist stationed at the entrance. John stopped just away from her line of vision and tried to see past her. The lounge was quiet, with only a few people visible. There – in one of the booths set up so that businessmen could work discreetly, someone who looked youngish, with a mop of dark hair,  was just visible poking at an IPad. John squared his shoulders and put on his charming but sheepish expression. He walked up to the desk. ‘Excuse me’, he said, ‘Karen’, and smiled, full-wattage. ‘I’m Mr Stedman’s colleague – or PA, really’ – he gestured towards the man in the corner – ‘I’m just bringing him his laptop for the flight’. He held up the laptop bag, careful to use his left arm. ‘He left it in the restaurant.’ He risked a slight eye-roll – employee solidarity - and leaned forward slightly. ‘He’ll notice in a minute and well – heads will roll. My head, to be precise. Do you mind if I hand it over? I’ll only be a moment’.

Karen smiled back, professional, and looked him over, slightly less professionally. John held her gaze. ‘I’m not supposed to’, she said, ‘but as you’re with one of our guests, and if you’re not staying….’.

‘Taking care of business for him in New York’, said John. ‘But he goes first, I go Economy.’

‘Don’t I know it’, she said. ‘Go on through. If he’s for Moscow, you’re just in time.’

‘You’re a star’, said John. ‘I really won’t be long.’ He walked past. This was the tricky bit. If Karen were watching closely – but luckily his quarry had chosen a darker area of the lounge. Right. He walked up to the man rapidly, unzipping the laptop bag as he went. ‘Marcus Stedman?’ he said. He felt a flicker of satisfaction: there could be no doubt. Closer up this man was remarkably like Sherlock, dark hair, pale skin, cheekbones, except obviously much younger and with hazel eyes. John slipped into the seat beside him, turning sideways to face him: the receptionist wouldn’t be able to see much more than their heads over the back of the booth, perfect. Stedman opened his mouth to say something, confusion and dawning fear on his face, but by then John had raised his right hand to his throat, sharp edges of glass digging in just the right amount. ‘What – ' said Stedman.

‘Keep quiet and don’t move’, said John. ‘I doubt I can kill you with this, but I can sever an artery. I’ve done it before, in Afghanistan.’ This wasn’t entirely a lie. Stedman’s throat worked, shifting the glass, his eyes darted for help.

‘My friend wants to talk to you. Sherlock Holmes.’ John had the satisfaction of seeing Marcus Stedman turn visibly paler, his eyes widening. ‘I’m going to ring him now, and you will listen to what he says. You will not call for help, or I will seriously damage you before it arrives. Just nod if that’s clear’. Stedman nodded.

‘Good’, said John. His phone was in his left pocket. He lowered his right hand to the tabletop, though keeping it ready – Stedman’s hand darted to his throat, checking for injury – took out the phone, and awkwardly hit Sherlock’s new number.

‘Sherlock’, he said. ‘I’m passing you over’. Stedman took the phone as though it would bite, and gingerly held it to his ear. John heard the rumble of Sherlock’s voice, sounding curt. ‘What?’ said Stedman. ‘When? Shit, don’t – don’t hurt him.’ Sherlock said something else. ‘What? Is he OK? No, I’ll come, I’ll come now.’ He sounded defeated. ‘You know I won’t run.’ His face crumpled. John reached out and took the phone from him.

‘What now?’, he said.

‘Marcus has just received some bad news’, said Sherlock. ‘His father has had a potentially nasty accident. He’ll have to cancel his flight and rush to his side.’

‘I see’, said John. 

‘I’ll be waiting at Arrivals’, said Sherlock. ‘He should come quietly. And if he does try to make a fuss…’

‘I’ll deal with it’, said John.

‘Yes’, said Sherlock, with a confidence that warmed John, and hung up.

‘Right’, said John, looking with more curiosity at Marcus Stedman. He hadn’t missed Sherlock’s use of his first name; there was a history there. ‘Let’s go and let the nice receptionist help us, shall we?’ He unzipped the laptop bag unobtrusively and dropped in the glass, then stood up and took Stedman’s arm to help him out, warningly. He came easily, seemingly defeated, standing by John in silence while John explained to Karen that they needed to get out of the airport; sudden family emergency, and she made sympathetic noises and rang for someone to escort them out. John kept a wary eye on Stedman and one hand lightly on his sleeve, trying to make it look friendly rather than threatening, but he couldn’t see him as the kind of criminal who would suddenly pull off a violent escape. He looked spoiled, wealthy, a trust-fund child, the sort of person who always travelled first-class and expected everything to go his way, and who didn’t know what to do when it didn’t.

It was remarkably easy to get back to Arrivals when led there by a staff member, and thankfully they didn’t seem to have noticed that John wasn’t actually booked on a New York flight. John brushed off offers to rebook them on later flights, and explained Stedman’s continued sullen silence as shock at the tragic news. He shook the assistant’s (Amanda, her nametag said) hand, and looked around for Sherlock. He was sitting in the nearest waiting area, slouched, hiding behind, of all things, a music magazine. Perhaps he thought it went with John’s clothes. John took Stedman’s arm firmly and towed him over. Sherlock lowered the magazine.

‘John’, he said, with a quick blink that said as clearly as words: well done. ‘I like your suit.’ His face hardened. ‘Marcus. Been busy since we last met, haven’t you? Word of advice: if you want to pretend to be someone and then set them up for your crimes, it will work better if you pick someone stupid and ordinary.  Someone like you.’

Stedman flushed and his expression contorted, ugly. ‘I’ll – ', he said.

‘You’ll do what?’, said Sherlock with contempt. ‘Handcuff me to a bed and then torture me? Call Daddy for help when it goes wrong? Or were you thinking of making a scene now? Because John here could easily disable you before you do, and besides, I really wouldn’t suggest leaving your father in his current predicament any longer than you have to.’

Stedman was breathing hard, his hands clenched into fists: ‘If you’ve hurt him - ’, he said.

‘I think I can say with confidence that I have’, said Sherlock, standing. Face to face he and Stedman weren’t all that similar, John noted. Sherlock was definitely taller, for one thing. ‘And with equal confidence, that he’s missed his own flight out. Your filial concern is very touching.’ He turned to John. ‘We’re going to the Cotswolds, about an hour’s drive. Rental car will be quickest. Come on’ – sharply, to Stedman – and he set off purposefully through the concourse, as though it were empty space, as opposed to full of people who’d spent the last twenty-four hours staring at his face on the national news.

John stuck close to Stedman through the process of hiring a car, aside from a brief step away to bin his improvised weapon. As he handed over his card yet again, he reflected that once this was over, Sherlock seriously owed him. He only relaxed, marginally, once they were actually in the car, Sherlock at the wheel and Stedman in the back seat. (There had been a brief tussle over whether Sherlock was fit to drive, particularly since the car was hired in John’s name, but John had caved – nothing was worse than Sherlock trying to give him directions).

‘We should tie his hands’, John said, measuring the distance; if Stedman were enterprising, he could try to grab one of them and probably crash the car in the process.

 ‘Just keep an eye on him’, said Sherlock, reaching into his back pocket, and passing John his gun.

‘You _took a gun into Heathrow?_ ’, said John, incredulous.

‘Of course’, said Sherlock, pulling out of the car park. ‘I wasn’t going through any scanners. And I thought you might object if I threw it away.’

John gave him his we-will-have-words-about-this-but-not-in-front-of-the-suspect look, cocked the gun, and pointed it steadily at Stedman, who shrank back slightly.

‘He is a pathetic excuse for a criminal, isn’t he’, said Sherlock, without looking. ‘This case has been an almost total waste of my time.’ He stressed the ‘almost’ slightly, just glancing at John.  ‘Which’, he added to Stedman, in the mirror, ‘is valuable.’

‘You’ve only been on the case for forty-eight hours, and for most of that half the police in London and your brother have been looking for you’, John said.

‘And it was inexcusable that it took me more than forty-eight minutes’, said Sherlock. ‘Though to be fair, most of that time was simply taken up in amassing the evidence.’ Stedman twitched slightly at ‘evidence’.

‘Yes’, said John. ‘Who is ‘Anna’, exactly? What was that all about?’

Sherlock pulled out smoothly onto the motorway, not speaking again until they were driving steadily in the fast lane.

‘People respond better to queries from a woman’, he said.

‘And the BBC address?’, said John.

‘Ditto, from a BBC journalist’, said Sherlock. ‘Marcus here has been studying at Harvard for the last few years. Amazingly easy to hack university systems and find student records. Almost as easy as hacking into the Boston Police Department. Turns out his extracurricular interests attracted some police attention there, too. I couldn’t enquire as myself, obviously, but if I were a journalist working on links to the London crimes….’

‘So this Jeff...’, John said.

‘Had a very unpleasant but very memorable encounter with Marcus last year, and is happy to identify him.’

John looked at Stedman, his mouth thinning. ‘What did you do to Toby?’, he demanded.

Stedman folded his arms and looked pointedly out of the window.

‘Toby’s alive’, said Sherlock. ‘No thanks to Marcus. I don’t know what state he’s in, though. We should find out shortly.’

‘You’ve seen him?’, asked John.

‘No’, said Sherlock. John waited, but nothing else seemed to be forthcoming. Sherlock appeared to be concentrating on forcing all other vehicles out of the fast lane. The car protested. John would usually have said something about speeding, but in the light of everything else Sherlock could be arrested for it seemed a bit trivial.

‘Are you saving the grand reveal for later?’, he said. ‘Wait – are we going to a country house where the suspects are gathered so that you can do a full exposition in the drawing-room?’

The corners of Sherlock’s mouth curved upwards. ‘Sometimes you have an uncanny ability to hit the nail on the head, John’, he said.

‘Because I hate it when you do that’, John said.

‘Hardly my fault Lord Stedman owns a country house’, said Sherlock. ‘Turn on the radio if you want to be entertained until we get there.’

Just to annoy him, John turned the dial to Classic FM. Sherlock’s mouth twitched, but they drove the rest of the way in silence, listening to the William Tell Overture and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

***

When they eventually pulled into the driveway of a house, John was pleased to note that it was exactly the kind of Agatha Christie mansion he’d envisaged, honey-coloured stone, roses, box hedges and all. There was probably a terrace with peacocks round the back. Sherlock left the car carelessly parked halfway across the drive. John let Stedman out. He seemed agitated, and the moment he was a step away from John, he ran for the front door. ‘Dad!’, he shouted, turning the knob; the door opened and let him in.

John was on his heels, gun in hand, but Sherlock’s hand on his shoulder stopped him. ‘Don’t shoot’, he said. ‘Come on’. They went into a dark hall, flagstones underfoot, smelling of expensive furniture wax and lilies, and then into what was indeed a drawing-room, full of uncomfortable-looking sofas and antique furniture.  Stedman was bending over something on the floor; as John approached he could see that it was an older man tied tightly to a chair with rope. He recognized the knots.

‘He’s not breathing’, said Stedman, frantically, ‘You’ve killed him’.

‘I did tell him not to struggle or it would tip the chair’, said Sherlock, unmoved. ‘Stand back. John, watch him.’ He went over to the chair and pulled it upright again without much effort; the man stayed slumped, as much as the ropes would let him. There was a trickle of blood coming from his nose. John’s jaw tightened. He remembered thinking about Sherlock’s propensity for violence – if he’d tortured someone to get evidence….

‘Passed out’, said Sherlock, briefly. John let out a breath. Sherlock picked up a vase standing on one of the polished tables, unceremoniously dumped the flowers in it on the carpet, and threw the water in the man’s – Lord Stedman’s – face, following this up with slapping him, hard. Lord Stedman spluttered and gasped. His eyes opened, squinting. Heedless of John’s gun, Marcus Stedman ran to him and knelt at his feet, gripping his knees, oddly intimate. ‘Dad’, he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Marcus’, Lord Stedman croaked. ‘You shouldn’t have come back. You could have been safe.’ He looked at Sherlock. ‘You’ve got what you wanted. Untie me, and then call the police.’ 

Sherlock nodded. ‘John’, he said. ‘Knife in the pocket of the green Barbour hanging in the hall.’

John went to fetch it, glancing at the Stedmans. Marcus was stroking his father’s face tenderly. It gave John the creeps. He came back in and, just to show off, tossed the knife to Sherlock, who caught it one-handed and used it to slice through the ropes. Lord Stedman fell forward into his son’s arms. Sherlock was already dialing. ‘Police?’, he said. ‘There’s a situation at The Laurels. You’d better get here as quickly as possible.’ He caught John’s eye. ‘Murder may be involved’, he said, gravely. John suppressed a laugh: not the time or place. Sherlock gestured towards the door. John flicked his eyes over the Stedmans and looked a question at him; Sherlock shrugged. John followed him into the hall, and Sherlock closed the door behind them and leant against it.

‘Should we be leaving them to confer?’, asked John. ‘Or escape?’

‘Police station’s only ten minutes away’, said Sherlock. ‘This is the only door, and those windows are reinforced. And it doesn’t really matter in any case. Toby’s alive, and very unlikely to defend them. Their plan was to flee the country. I don’t think they made contingency measures for the alternative.’ He slid down the door and sat on the floor, tipping his head back against it.

John went and sat beside him, leaving a small space between their bodies. The floor was cold. Sherlock sighed, deeply. ‘Besides’, he said, ‘Stedman doesn’t know about Boston. Marcus left three male prostitutes with knife wounds; one nearly lost an eye. He’s not going to go free, no matter what his father tells the police.’

‘How do you know them?’, said John.

‘Not going to wait for the audience?’, said Sherlock. He looked at John, and then smiled, amused.

‘What?’, said John.

‘We look – ', said Sherlock, and gestured at John’s smart suit and his own battered jeans and top.

‘Like we put on each others’ clothes this morning?’, said John. He grinned back. ‘I don’t know how you do this every day. I feel like a complete twat.’

‘You look…good’, said Sherlock, studying him thoughtfully. It was – undeniably hot, to be the subject of his scrutiny.

‘I can think of better looks on you’, John said. Sherlock met his eyes and his gaze grew heated, hungry. They were almost touching.

‘Are you – flirting with me again?’, said Sherlock, low. He managed to make ‘flirting’ sound like a banned sexual activity.

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know’, said John, flushing but trying to keep his composure. ‘Again, though, not really the time or place. And – ’

‘I know, I know’, said Sherlock. He leant against the door again and shut his eyes. ‘I assumed you’d worked out how I met the Stedmans.’

‘How would I – ’, said John, and then realized that he did know, after all. ‘Through Toby’, he said.

‘Obvious’, said Sherlock. ‘Not many people knew – know – about Toby and I, and also have the money and connections to hire four relatively competent goons. Only one, in fact.’

‘You said Toby had trouble with a client’, said John, remembering. ‘That was Marcus Stedman?’

‘No’, said Sherlock. ‘His father.' He opened his eyes and looked at John. ‘Marcus’s mother was Russian, heiress to various mineral and oil interests in the Caucasus; very rich, very beautiful. By all accounts her long marriage to Anthony Stedman was perfectly happy. She died when Marcus was fifteen, and two years later Stedman met Toby at some political event. He was working as a researcher then, I believe; Stedman was sniffing around for a political career, having made his millions. Two months after that, Toby moved in with him. He presented it as patronage, a lonely widower lending a hand to a young man in need of advice and financial assistance, but it was pretty clear to observers that he was totally infatuated. I investigated their local reputation when I was here three years ago, which was a year after Toby had come on the scene’.

‘OK’, said John. ‘Go on’.

‘Stedman showed up on my doorstep in a state, broke down and said that Toby was blackmailing him with videos of the two of them in bed together, and that Toby was the love of his life, how could he do this to him, what was he to tell the Conservative Party, he’d lose his peerage, and so on. He said that Toby had locked himself in his room and was refusing to confirm or deny the blackmail, but that the videos had been taken inside Stedman’s bedroom and no-one else could possibly have had access. Toby had once told him about me and he’d remembered when he was racking his brains for someone discreet to help him.’ Sherlock steepled his fingers under his chin. ‘He also told me his son was equally devastated and that Marcus and Toby had always been perfectly friendly to each other when Marcus was home for the holidays. It seemed self-evident. And when I came here and met Marcus, I was certain.’ He paused, seemingly for dramatic effect.

‘How?’, said John, obliging.

‘Watched his reflection in the window when Stedman was crying on his shoulder about Toby. I’ve seldom seen such concentrated hatred in anyone’s face.’ He stretched. ‘Toby knew it was Marcus too, of course, but he wasn’t fool enough to tell a doting father than his only son was not only blackmailing him, but had been secretly filming his father and his new lover together for his own purposes. Toby told me Marcus had propositioned him, too, and he was terrified Stedman would find out and kick him out. I tracked down Marcus’s electronic devices – home and school – and wiped them, and Toby got him on his own and recorded him confessing. It was a nice piece of work, actually. Though luckily I was also concealed in the room at the time, as when Marcus realized he was cornered he went for Toby with a marble bookend, could have bashed his head in.’

‘Hmmm’, said John.

‘Yes, alright’, said Sherlock. ‘I should have known then. But he was only seventeen, and I confess I had a certain amount of …sympathy for his position. His response was perhaps excessive, but understandable, and the planning involved was not unintelligent.’ 

‘You sound as though you admired him’, said John.

Sherlock frowned. ‘My family circumstances were different’, he said. ‘But if I had been judged by my actions at seventeen…’ He seemed to shake himself slightly. ‘To cut a long story short: Stedman forgave Marcus and shipped him off to the States for university, and Toby moved out of the house and into a lucrative career in prostitution, with Stedman quietly bankrolling him when needed and seeing him discreetly. Marcus left me the odd comment on my blog, every few months or so – odd in several senses – styling himself a fan. I ignored him, of course. But that was stupid of me: I believed he was still in the States, and I hadn’t been paying due attention to the recent crimes in London. When you told me about what had happened at the Savoy, I was sure it was the Stedmans. Aside from anything else, Stedman’s been a regular at the hotel for years, and he often met Toby there; fancied they were Oscar Wilde and Bosie, I think.’

He stopped, listening. John listened too, and heard the faint sound of a police siren. ‘Four minutes thirty seconds away’, said Sherlock. ‘Approximately.’

‘Tell me quickly’, said John. ‘I still don’t understand why they would put all this effort into setting you up. If Toby worked out it was Marcus who was attacking his friends, and told his father, didn’t Marcus and his dad just have to, to get rid of him?’

‘You’re missing the point’, said Sherlock, impatient. ‘Or two points, in fact. They _should_ have killed Toby, as it’s turned out, but Stedman’s sentimental streak has always been his undoing, and he wanted him alive. But he also didn’t want his only son in prison as a murdering sex offender. Hence my part in this.’

John must still have been looking bemused, because Sherlock sighed and continued. ‘They didn’t frame me so that I would be arrested and convicted of the crimes. They framed me because they knew that I would know that Marcus was guilty. But if the police were distracted by their presumptions of my involvement, they were less likely to listen. Stedman was supposed to fly out to Rio on business at 5am this morning. And that flight to Moscow – Marcus has fluent Russian and a variety of well-heeled relatives there. They were planning to leave from different places: I couldn’t have stopped both of them.’ He met John’s eyes. ‘Three years ago, I was working alone.’ 

John’s throat closed up. ‘Thanks’, he said.

‘That should be my line, I believe’, said Sherlock. The sirens seemed to round a bend and grew louder. ‘And Toby?’, said John, quickly.

‘Banal in the extreme’, said Sherlock. ‘I imagine that after your conversation Toby contacted Stedman, or more unlikely, Marcus. In either case, Stedman panicked and arranged to meet Toby at the hotel, had his men show up instead, knock him out, injure him sufficiently to produce a good quantity of blood, stuff him in a large case and then Stedman took it out on a trolley. Since that MI6 case, every fool knows you can fit a body in a holdall, dead or alive, though in the latter case it’s a bit more work. Stedman told me he had Toby taken to a very private hospital a few miles from here.’

‘Seriously?’, said John. ‘They didn’t take you out in a suitcase, though.’

‘Evidently not. Through the kitchens and out the back, apparently.’ Sherlock scowled. ‘Humiliating. If anyone recognized me… Stedman’s very well-known at the Savoy, and a friend of the management. It wouldn’t be hard for him to ask or bribe some staff to turn a blind eye, or believe a thin story. Even if they suspected, they wouldn’t finger him. And very few people know for sure about Toby’s connection with the Stedmans: there wouldn’t have been any reason for the police to make the connection.’

A car screeched into the driveway, blue and red lights washing over his expression. ‘But why didn’t they flee the country before this morning?’, John said. ‘And come to think of it, why was Marcus pretending to be you in the first place?’

‘Because they couldn’t resist hanging around to congratulate themselves on the success of their cunning plan’, said Sherlock. ‘Or they wanted to wait until I was safely in custody, who knows. Underestimating my resources, naturally.’ There was a knock on the door. ‘Police!’, someone shouted. ‘Open up!’

 ‘Coming’, called Sherlock, pushing himself up with ease. John scrambled to his feet, considerably less gracefully.  ‘As for Marcus - you could psychoanalyse him if you want’, he said over his shoulder. ‘Or you could simply observe that he knew my name and that he looked and sounded a little like me; he may have known about Toby, too.’  

He opened the front door with a sweeping gesture, causing the two policemen on the doorstep to fall back a step. ‘Yes, I am the notorious Sherlock Holmes’, he said. ‘But do have a word with the Stedmans before you arrest me. You’ll find them in the drawing-room’, and he opened the drawing-room door.

***

Several hours later, and only after the local police had had a long conversation with Scotland Yard, Sherlock and John were escorted firmly into a police car (as were the Stedmans) to be driven back to London for more questioning. There wasn’t much John felt he could say to Sherlock with the police listening in, and anyway, Sherlock had closed his eyes as soon as they got into the car.  John looked out of the window and thought a bit about the Stedmans, and about Sherlock at seventeen, and about all the loose ends that still hadn’t been tied up, and about how long it would take to clear Sherlock’s name, and what he might do or say when he and Sherlock were, finally, alone together with nowhere to be.

It took another four hours, in the end, and Sherlock’s name was by no means clear. Sherlock and he were questioned separately. John edited out the bottle, though he knew it might be pointless. They had his gun, after all, which featured prominently in the questions. His interview took an hour and a half. Sherlock’s with DI Bloomfield took three, and then there was another long period of filling in forms and signing things. John had three cups of truly shocking tea and another cheese sandwich. They gave him back his laptop bag, but they wouldn’t give Sherlock back his coat, or his laptop, either, which he was muttering about audibly as they – finally! – left the building. Greg was waiting for them in the street, smoking: not a good sign for his stress levels. 

‘Like your new look, Sherlock’, he said.

Sherlock gave him a withering look. ‘I just handed over the actual criminals to you on a plate, practically with signed confessions. I was framed. I was hit over the head by dangerous Russian criminal elements. I had to resort to desperate stratagems to find the evidence, including practically walking through the fields to the Cotswolds, thanks to you plastering my picture all over the TV, and your colleagues won’t even return _my_ stolen property.’

John thought that this level of theatricality was a good sign; it meant Sherlock was feeling like himself. Greg stubbed out the cigarette. ‘DI Bloomfield not admiring enough of your genius, was she? Count yourself lucky some of us hard-working cops got Mr King’s statement out of him an hour or two ago, or you’d be in a cell right now.’ He looked at John. ‘What’s this I hear about manufacturing dangerous weapons out of broken glass in an international airport?’

‘Really?’, said Sherlock, distracted from his huffing.

‘Much exaggerated’, said John. ‘Marcus Stedman would have believed anything I told him.’

‘Save it for your next statements’, said Greg. ‘Because believe me, you’re not done yet. You can show me the way of it next time we’re in the pub.’

‘No hard feelings?’, said John.

‘Wouldn’t say that exactly’, said Greg. ‘Should be resigned to it by now, though. You two against the world, and all that. We’ll still be having that drink, but you might be buying for the next few weeks’.

‘Good’, said John. ‘I mean, fine by me, looking forward to it.’ He smiled, more confidently. ‘I can fill you in on the rest of the story then, too.’

‘See you later’, said Greg, and he went back inside.

Sherlock stepped to the curb and hailed a taxi, which ignored him. He tried another, which sped past and stopped for a couple a few metres further down the road.

‘They stop for your coat’, explained John, and at Sherlock’s look of outrage he got the giggles, abruptly, slightly hysterically. Sherlock unable to get a taxi because he was wearing John’s old clothes was suddenly one of the most amusing things he had ever seen.

‘Stop laughing and have a go yourself; you’re the one in the suit’, said Sherlock, crossly but with amusement in the lines of his mouth.

Still laughing, John waved a hand feebly into the road: a taxi pulled over almost instantly. A fresh wave of hysteria convulsed him: Sherlock had to practically pull him into the cab.  ‘Sorry’, said John, gasping, waving feebly towards the driver, ‘Sorry, I’ll stop in a moment’. Sherlock was giving the directions. The cab pulled out. He looked over at John and raised an eyebrow. John cracked up afresh. From the corner of his eye he could see that Sherlock’s shoulders were shaking.

‘We shouldn’t be giggling’, said John. He calmed down a bit, wiping his eyes.

‘One could say we had cause to celebrate’, said Sherlock. ‘Though I wish this case had been more _interesting_. It was all emotion and no intellect. Carelessness, lack of foresight, lack of _research_. Hire some muscle, throw money around’, he gestured broadly. ‘Keep the key witness against you alive due to misguided affection; depressingly typical.’

John took a couple of deep breaths. ‘Only you could say that being Britain’s Most Wanted was boring’, he said. ‘I don’t think the tabloids will find the Stedmans dull. This is going to be a huge scandal.’

‘Precisely my point’, said Sherlock. He slid down the seat a bit. ‘It’s the cases that don’t make the papers that are really worth my time.’

He was thinking of Moriarty, John knew. He sobered up rapidly, and they travelled the short distance home in silence.

Several reporters were on their doorstep, jumping up eagerly as Sherlock exited the cab. He held up an imperious hand. ‘The scoop is at New Scotland Yard’, he said. The reporters scrambled over them to get in the cab, with the exception of one man who pushed a microphone in their faces, bleating something. Sherlock brushed past him as though he wasn’t there, and they went inside.

John wasn’t sure what he expected to happen once they entered the flat. He thought that if he pretended the last forty-eight hours had never happened, Sherlock would probably go along with it. He also thought that if he went to Sherlock and kissed him, Sherlock would go along with that too. But what did Sherlock want? More to the point, what did _John_ want? It was still only early evening, but he was exhausted, for one thing, and Sherlock must be ready to pass out. But if they went into their separate rooms and shut the doors, if the flirting and camaraderie of the case dissipated, then John felt instinctively that the second option would recede into the past.

He was still undecided when he entered the living-room, Sherlock just behind him, and went to put his stuff on the desk. But Sherlock wasn’t. As John straightened up, Sherlock was behind him, holding him loosely, right hand sliding round to hook into John’s waistband, head bent so that he was breathing on the sensitive skin below John’s ear. John’s breath hitched, and he felt his pulse speed up, his cock already hardening. Sherlock had left a careful space between their bodies, but as John leant back into his embrace he closed that space and pressed himself along the length of John’s back, and his teeth grazed John’s skin. John reached back with one hand, blindly, and gripped at Sherlock’s hip.

‘I want to take this suit off you’, said Sherlock, ‘and then suck your cock.’ His breath against John’s skin made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. John’s knees weakened, as any lingering hesitations evaporated into a haze of lust. ‘Ah’, he said, incapable of shaping anything more. Sherlock worked his hand under John’s trousers, long fingers just grazing his cock, and John’s hips jerked into the contact. Sherlock hissed into his ear. ‘Will you let me?’, he said, fingers moving, delicately.

John would have raised his eyebrows at this odd courtesy, but he was finding it hard to process anything. ‘Yes’, he said, gasping. ‘Ah – yes. I – '. He needed more participation. He twisted round in Sherlock’s grasp, and pulled him down into a kiss that started out clumsy and rapidly became heated, as their mouths found the right angle. Sherlock tasted of cheap coffee and, beneath that, of himself. Odd to kiss someone so much taller than him, part of John’s brain registered, but most of it was focused on pressing his erection into Sherlock’s thigh, and on Sherlock’s hand, now gripping John’s backside. Sherlock slid his tongue around John’s, teasing, and John thought of that tongue on his cock; his stomach contracted with want and his hips jerked involuntarily. He broke off, gasping. ‘Bedroom?’, he said.

‘Mine’, said Sherlock. ‘Closer’. He started steering John in that direction, trying to kiss him at the same time, their legs tangling. They managed to stagger into Sherlock’s room, until John hit the edge of his bed and sat down. Sherlock was standing in front of him, hands on John’s shoulders, and John, daring, ran a hand over the front of his jeans and then used both hands to undo the button and zip, reaching inside, feeling Sherlock’s cock, hard and hot, through John’s old boxers, an unbearably erotic thought. Sherlock’s hands tightened on his shoulders. ‘Wait’, he said. He pulled back and stripped the sweatshirt over his head, heeling off his shoes and working down his jeans, efficient. John pushed his own shoes off, and his jacket, trying to undo the fiddly buttons of his shirt. Sherlock slipped down to kneel between John’s legs and undid his trousers, then without bothering to take them off, bent his head to mouth John’s cock. John gasped, and his hands moved, involuntarily, to clutch at Sherlock’s head, the hot breath through his boxers was maddeningly not quite enough. 

Sherlock lifted his head slightly and met John’s eyes. He looked intent and lit up, as he did when he was on the verge of solving some intractable problem. ‘Lie back’, he said, and it should perhaps have been worrying that John let himself fall back on the bed without question, Sherlock undeniably in charge of this encounter, but it was also arousing to surrender the need to make decisions. Sherlock pulled off John’s trousers and boxers down and off, nudged his legs wider, and then a second later his mouth was on John, licking and sucking, just the right amount of pressure, one hand stroking the sensitive skin behind his balls, feather-light. John groaned embarrassingly loudly, he hadn’t the leverage to move much but he couldn’t help trying to thrust into Sherlock’s mouth, and Sherlock was letting him – god, he wasn’t going to last long, he was wound so tightly – and when Sherlock increased the pressure and moved his other hand to slide on John’s cock in counterpoint with his mouth, it was only a few moments of blinding, rising pleasure before he was trying to warn Sherlock, incoherently, and then coming into his mouth. Sherlock swallowed around him, which was unexpected and made his body jerk, helplessly, with aftershocks.

John tried to focus a bit; he should reciprocate. He struggled up on his elbows. Sherlock’s head was resting on his thigh, he was breathing hard, and he was – Christ, he was touching himself, one arm moving. ‘Come here’, John said, only a little cracked, and reached to tug at Sherlock’s shoulder, ineffectually pulling him up and onto the bed. A pang of nerves shot through his orgasmic haze – what if Sherlock wanted – but Sherlock slid his body over John’s, rubbing against him, and when John moved his hand to cover Sherlock’s, still working his own cock, Sherlock made a choked-off sound, thrust hard, and John felt him coming between their hands. 

Sherlock lay there a moment, a heavy weight, and just when John was about to ask him to move, he rolled off to lie on his back, wiping his hand on the sheets. ‘Um’, said John. He had no idea what to say. He cleared his throat. ‘Thanks. I – um'.

‘I think I need to sleep’, Sherlock said, sounding put-out. He turned his head to look at John. ‘You can stay if you wish, though I should clarify that I won’t be offended if you don’t.’

‘OK’ , said John. He thought perhaps he should go to his own bed, but he didn’t feel capable of moving. His eyes were heavy. Sherlock shifted enough to pull the duvet loose and out from under John, and then drape it over them; he rolled onto his side, facing away from John. John had a brief moment where he wondered if he should be trying to cuddle, and then his eyes were closed and he was asleep.

He woke up some time later, disoriented in the darkness, until he remembered where he was. He had shifted so that Sherlock, still on his side and apparently fast asleep, was warm against him. John looked at the bedside clock: quarter to one. He’d meant to have a brief nap, and had slept for six hours or so. His body informed him that he was thirsty, hungry, needed a pee, and also that there was a warm body beside him and that more sex would be good, fantastic in fact. But the uncertainty and doubt that had vanished earlier were making a comeback: what was he doing here, in Sherlock’s bed, what were they doing.

He got up, quietly, picked up his boxers, and went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen for water. There was a piece of cake left and not much else, so he ate it standing up against the counter, quickly, and then hesitated. He went back to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face, partly as a delaying tactic. Should he go to his own room, or to Sherlock’s bed?

He went to the door of Sherlock’s room and looked in at him. If you were prepared to suspect someone of rape and murder, what did it say about you if you then jumped into bed with them? It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Sherlock wasn’t guilty in the ways that John had, briefly, imagined, but he wasn’t innocent either. He was still someone who had paid Toby for sex, for one thing; and John remembered Toby saying that Sherlock wanted to hurt him, that Sherlock was kinky. What did that even mean? John had had a few sexual encounters with men, mostly a quick hand-job, nothing too serious, and he thought that he was out of his depth. But then, he had been out of his depth since the moment he met Sherlock, and he was still there. 

Sherlock stirred in the bed. ‘You’re _thinking_ too much’, he said, muffled in the sheets. John jumped a little, guilty.

‘That’s rich, coming from you’, he said. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was’, said Sherlock. ‘But I could feel your thoughts. Or second thoughts.’ He pushed himself up to sit at the head of the bed, his face half-visible in the darkened room.

‘I don’t know what you want’, said John in a rush.

‘Do you need it spelled out?’, said Sherlock. ‘I want to have sex with you.’

‘I got that’, said John. ‘But it’s not that simple, is it? And I meant perhaps – more specifically. In terms of, of sex and also – everything else.’ It was cold in the doorway. He went to sit on the bed, beside Sherlock, who turned to examine his face, frowning.

‘Is this about Toby?’, he said.

‘Partly’, John admitted. ‘Mostly.’ He sighed. ‘Toby said some things.’ Sherlock looked a question at him. ‘He said that sometimes he thought you wanted to hurt him, and that he thought you might be into – ’ John couldn’t think of the right word, so he ended, lamely, ‘stuff’.

‘Ah’, said Sherlock. ‘You said ‘specifically’ – are you asking me for details? About what I might be ‘into’? With Toby?’

‘God, no’, said John, hastily. He could easily imagine Sherlock laying out his past sexual encounters in graphic detail. ‘I just – I don’t know what’. He trailed off. He was regretting starting this conversation. Maybe they should just shag again, that had been simpler.

Sherlock drew his knees up, under the sheet, and clasped his hands around them. ‘This kind of discussion is not – my field’, he said. ‘I don’t want to say anything – I would prefer it if you didn’t move out.’

‘What?’, said John, thrown. ‘I’m _in bed_ with you. Who said anything about moving out?’

‘You were looking at flats’, said Sherlock. ‘A few weeks ago. After you saw Toby and me that night. But you couldn’t find any that you could afford, and you like living in this area.’

‘Oh God’, said John. ‘Of course you found out. And you – you knew I saw you, with Toby? Wait – were you in the living-room on purpose?’ Some of Sherlock’s behaviour was starting to make more sense.

Sherlock’s shoulders hunched slightly, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Toby told me you were interested. In me’, John said. ‘But I didn’t believe him. I was looking at flats because I was pissed off and upset. And maybe – maybe jealous. But I don’t want to move out. This, though’, he gestured, ‘I mean, gay sex isn’t exactly _my_ field, and I was just thrown by – by Toby. Toby and you.’

Sherlock looked at him. ‘Toby said you were jealous’, he said. ‘I have to say, I didn’t believe him either. But he was right about me. I am interested.’ He stopped, clearly weighing options. ‘Whatever he said, it was true. I didn’t hurt him, but if he had wanted to, if he had let me – Sex is, in itself, dull, but people’s responses are fascinating, body and mind. Yours especially. You want to know what I want. I want – I want to know how your body works. I want to know what you think about when you touch yourself and exactly how you do it. I want to see if I can make you desire things that you’ve never thought of before. I want to find the edge between pain and pleasure and hold you there. Among other things. Whatever you’ve been imagining, yes, I probably want to do it to you. But it wouldn’t work, if you were unwilling.’

‘Christ, Sherlock’, said John. He was getting hard again, and his mouth was dry. He licked his lips. ‘That’s – yes. A bit alarming but, God, yes. But I thought – you said you weren’t even interested in sex.’

‘You weren’t paying attention’, said Sherlock. ‘I said I didn’t _wan_ t to be interested. But I am. Very, even, with regard to you.’

John thought about the scope of Sherlock’s interest focused on him, on sex with him; it was a terrifying idea, but he wasn’t capable of turning away from it. ‘OK’, he said. ‘OK.  This isn’t one-way, though. If you want to – experiment – with me, then I should get to do the same, with you. I think you know more about what you’re doing, here, but I could learn.’

‘That…seems fair’, said Sherlock. He met John’s eyes and held them. ‘You would be able to stop me, if I did something you didn’t like.’

‘I would _tell_ you’, corrected John. ‘I don’t know – don’t people have safewords, things like that? And then you would stop, yourself. And whatever you want – you could ask for it. We both could.’

Sherlock’s gaze grew heated. ‘Right now’, he said. ‘I want to fuck you, as slowly as I can.  Do you do that?’

‘God’, said John. ‘For the record, you asking me for sex – that works for me. Yes. I mean, I haven’t done, but OK.  Yes. Please.’

Something flared in Sherlock’s eyes. ‘Good’, he said. ‘But first –‘, and he moved across to John and kissed him, hard, like sealing a compact.

***

**Epilogue**

Sherlock had said ‘hospital’, and John had expected a vaguely institutional-looking building, but the place they pulled up to looked like a lavishly restored Elizabethan manor. It didn’t even have a sign. They stopped in a small car-park discreetly tucked behind a yew hedge. Sherlock switched off the engine, and reached over to lay a hand on John’s thigh; John wondered if he was nervous, then decided that it was probably meant as reassurance.

He smiled at Sherlock and leant over to kiss him. Sherlock looked – not happy, precisely, but content, relaxed, for him. John liked it, knowing that he had put that look there. It was nearly three weeks since they had first had sex, and it was still new, still a little bit dangerous. So were their lives outside Baker St, in those weeks of police interviews and media speculation, until it was finally settled that Sherlock was not going to be charged with assaulting Lord Stedman, in return for not charging Stedman with assaulting him. Both Stedmans had attempted to confess to each others’ crimes, but without much success. John had thought he himself would be charged at least with possessing an unlawful weapon, but his gun had been mysteriously returned to them by special courier, and never mentioned again by the police: he took it as an apology to Sherlock, of sorts.

Mostly, when they were at home, things were as normal. Except that sometimes they would be mid-conversation or sitting across the breakfast table from each other, and then John would meet Sherlock’s eyes, and then they would be frantically trying to take each others’ clothes off and get back to bed. John had thought Sherlock cool and contained when it came to sex, unmoved. And he could certainly maintain that pose; he was often calculating in bed, narrow-eyed, quiet, holding onto control. That made it all the more satisfying, though, when John worked out what buttons to press to make Sherlock noisy, to make his brain temporarily shut down. And Sherlock would look almost surprised, afterwards, as though John had astonished him. Last night, when he had tried blindfolding Sherlock, spreading him out on the bed, using a vibrator on him (for someone who claimed not to be that interested in sex, Sherlock had a fairly substantial collection of sex toys, it turned out), and practicing his newly learned blowjob technique – that had been very satisfying.

‘What are you thinking?’, Sherlock asked, breaking the kiss.

‘Can’t you tell?’, said John.

‘Last night’, said Sherlock. ‘Hold that thought. Let’s get this over with, first.’ He opened his door.

John got out and followed him up to the house. Sherlock had insisted on wearing his coat, finally returned to him and carefully cleaned and repaired, even though it was a warm June day. It made John feel affectionate. They rang the bell, and a smartly dressed woman came to let them in.

‘Visitors for Mr King’, Sherlock said.

‘Of course’, she said. ‘Just follow me. You’ll find tea and coffee in the lounge if you’d like some.’

She led them into a sunny room at the back of the house, full of chintzy armchairs and, incongruously, an enormous flat-screen TV. Toby was in a wing-back chair, idly watching the news. He looked up and saw them, and switched it off.

‘Sherlock. John’, he said. ‘You’ll have to excuse my not standing up, I’m still supposed to be resting’. He looked paler and thinner than when John had last seen him, and some bandages were visible on his arms, beneath his sleeves, but otherwise he seemed alright.

‘We came to see how you were doing’, said John, taking a seat. Sherlock remained standing, arms folded.

‘All things considered, not too bad’, said Toby. ‘There was certainly a moment when I thought my time had come, so when I woke up here it was rather a relief. And I confess it’s pleasing to see Marcus Stedman behind bars.’

John nodded, agreeing. Toby’s eyes slid over him and then Sherlock. ‘I’m going to be incredibly broke once I leave here, though’, he said. ‘Pending the outcome of my case against Stedman, of course. He owns my flat. And with the publicity, my clients have taken fright. I see you two might have a spare bedroom going, perhaps you could put me up for a bit. You owe me, after all.’

Sherlock snorted. ‘Er, no’, said John. ‘Though thanks for, um, clearing Sherlock’s name. I’m sure you’ll be OK’.

‘It’s true that I have had a number of offers in other fields’, said Toby. ‘TV presenting, modeling, book deals – apparently a tell-all memoir would be hot property.’ He smiled suggestively up at Sherlock.

‘Publish and be damned, for my part’, said Sherlock. ‘There’s certainly nothing you can say about me that the tabloids haven’t already said.’

‘True’, said Toby. ‘You might reward me for playing matchmaker, though. You two certainly have that morning-after glow about you. Would you ever have got there without my help, I wonder?’

John coughed. He had forgotten how acutely annoying, or annoyingly acute, Toby could be.

‘Looks as though you’re nearly recovered’, Sherlock said briskly. ‘Best of luck with the rest of your life. I’m sure we’ll see you again, whether we want to or not. John, shall we go?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, already striding out of the door.

‘Your master calls’, said Toby.

John looked at him. ‘You were wrong about him’, he said.

‘In part’, said Toby. He sounded unrepentant. ‘Is this where you tell me that he’s all heart really, and that the world has cruelly misjudged him?’

‘No’, said John. ‘You know it isn’t that simple. Sherlock’s no angel. But he’s not a Marcus Stedman either.’

‘So you say’, said Toby. ‘I suppose if anyone would know, it’s you.’ He smirked. ‘Need any tips on your sex life, before you go?’

‘You really are obnoxious, aren’t you’, said John.

Toby laughed, genuine. ‘I try’, he said. ‘Tell Sherlock that I am actually sorry that I put him in the firing line. It didn’t occur to me that Stedman would try to set him up like that, and it probably should have.’

‘I will’, said John, standing up. ‘And for what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re OK.  That hotel room, I thought… well.’

‘It was a narrow escape, in a way’, said Toby. ‘I’m pretty sure I was next on Marcus’s list, so if I hadn’t gone to his father first, things could have been a great deal worse.’

John nodded. ‘Take care of yourself, in the future’, he said.

‘Advice noted’, said Toby. ‘You’d better go, before he causes a jealous scene.’ He turned back to the TV.

John went to look for Sherlock, who was already at the car, waiting impatiently. ‘Home?’, John said, going round to the passenger side.

‘If you want’, said Sherlock. ‘Or we passed a small hotel in the second-to-last village, with vacancies. Since we’ve no clients at present, I wondered if we might take the afternoon off. I borrowed DI Bloomfield’s credit card when she wasn’t looking.’ He smiled at John, all teeth.

‘Sounds like a plan’, said John, and got in the car. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title because I have watched beadedstar’s brilliant Sherlock/John vid to Elbow, ‘Grounds for Divorce’ far too many times while writing this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRq0YA6KdHE
> 
> I came up with this fic before reading 'Immortal Beloved' by greywash, which is an outstanding, and in my view more original take on a similar premise (I expect there are many others as well, but this is the one I've read repeatedly). 
> 
> The resolution here is, in part, based on ACD's 'The Sussex Vampire', though very loosely.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [【翻译】情难自禁](https://archiveofourown.org/works/962123) by [rosyrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosyrain/pseuds/rosyrain)




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